Andrew Evans

Three years ago, Jann Mardenborough had never sat in a race car. Today he’s carrying the big silverware away from the GP3 Series round at Hockenheim.

Silverstone again played host to the UK National Final of GT Academy this week and, despite some concerns about the quality of entrants thanks to a new entry method this year, showed the competition is just as strong as ever.

Making it to any GT Academy final is tough enough, but when you’re competing in the newest region of the annual competition with a billion countrymen, it’s a bit more special.

While not the busiest weekend of the summer for the Nismo Athletes, there were still seven men and four cars doing their day jobs around Europe yesterday.

Aston Martin is the latest manufacturer to get onto the Vision GT bandwagon, as this teaser image shows the Gaydon-based company’s input to the recent slew of Vision GT cars coming to Gran Turismo 6.

It’s been the busiest week of GT Academy’s summer of racing, facing 24 hours in Pays de la Loire one weekend and another 24 in the Eifel hills the next – and fortune didn’t follow the graduates this time.

It’s not even been a week since the highs and lows of the Le Mans 24 Hours and the GT Academy team are in action again, this time at the fearsome Nürburgring 24 Hours.

As revealed yesterday, Gran Turismo 6 has increased its track list by one with the addition of the Red Bull Ring – formerly the A1 Ring – ahead of this weekend’s Formula 1 race at the location.

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Concomitant with this morning’s 2 hour maintenance period, update v1.07 for GT6 has been released and it brings some teased content we’ve been looking forward to for some weeks.

While we’ve known for a while about Nissan’s factory attempt at Le Mans this year with Garage 56 entry ZEOD, it turns out they had something else in mind for some of the other Nismo Athletes.

To go with the first Senna Tribute slideshow unveiled today, more information about what will be contained in the late May update has also been revealed.

As the GP3 season gets underway tomorrow, Jann Mardenborough starts his next step towards a career in F1.

Hybrids, hacking, modding – call it what you will, the practice of fiddling with the car stable of Gran Turismo outside the usual confines of the game is almost as old as the series itself.

Gamers, start your engines – we’re just a week away from the next edition of GT Academy.

With both the Pro-Am driver and team championship titles captured in 2013, the Nissan GT Academy Team RJN will mount their defence of the Blancpain Endurance Series at Monza this weekend.