Jordan Greer

Back in 2013, GT Academy was in full swing, and a promising young driver from the UK by the name of Adam Suswillo made it all the way to the final race of the competition. Despite an impressive performance, Suswillo came up just short of the crown, as the judges selected Portugal’s Miguel Faisca as that year’s European GT Academy champion.

We’re only a day away from the FIA-certified Gran Turismo Championship World Finals beginning, and the predictions are rolling in.

When the Americas Regional Finals for the FIA-certified GT Championship were broadcast from Las Vegas two weeks ago, only brief clips of the World Final qualification races — also known as the “block” and “repechage” races — were shown on the live stream. Instead, the stream focused on the resulting top 10 drivers and their three final races to determine the regional champion.

The 2018 FIA GT Americas Regional Championship was held in Las Vegas last week, and saw the crowning of the first Americas Champion: Igor Fraga, known as “IOF_RACING17” in GT Sport.

Since 2003 one of the most coveted prizes at the SEMA show is the Gran Turismo Award. Hopefuls from around the world wait and see if their vehicle will find its way into a future Gran Turismo video game. The competition is always amazing and this year was no exception.

The following is part of GTPlanet’s exclusive coverage of the 2018 FIA Gran Turismo Championship, as our editorial team travels around the world to get you special access to the events and competitors. Stay tuned for more, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for a closer look behind the scenes.

Before we completely close the page on last week’s FIA-certified GT Championship EMEA Regional Finals and prepare for this week’s American Regional Finals in Las Vegas (which we’ll also be covering in full), we need to stop and take a moment to reflect on one of the best Gran Turismo events, ever.

The EMEA Regional Finals of the FIA GT Sport Championship were held in Madrid last weekend, where Mikail Hizal — better known as TRL_LIGHTNING on PSN and here in our forums — beat the other top 30 drivers from across Europe in a dominating performance.

As you probably know if you’ve read our extensive race reports from the FIA GT Championship EMEA Regional Finals, TRL_LIGHTNING (Mikail Hizal) was crowned the overall 2018 European Champion. Nine more drivers also qualified to move forward to the next stage of the competition, with the chance to represent their countries in the World Finals next month.

When Polyphony Digital released the schedule for the FIA GT Championship EMEA Regional Finals, we suspected a new track would be revealed at the event — just as the Austrian World Tour introduced Fuji Speedway.

The following is part of GTPlanet’s exclusive coverage of the 2018 FIA Gran Turismo Championship, as our editorial team travels around the world to get you special access to the events and competitors. Stay tuned for more, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for a closer look behind the scenes.

We’re just a few days away from the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, & Africa) Regional Finals for the FIA GT Sport Championship, and details about the event in Madrid, Spain, are starting to emerge.

The last week has been pretty exciting for Gran Turismo Sport players, and it all comes to a head today with the launch of the game’s latest update, version 1.28. Weighing in at 3.7GB, it sees the return of a popular Japanese race track, nine new cars, new GT League events, new scapes, and more.

It’s been a long time since we saw a game featuring the world’s most grueling race, but Bigmoon Entertainment has finally brought the challenge back into our living rooms. After a brief delay, Dakar ’18 is finally available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam.

A new trailer for the upcoming 1.28 update for Gran Turismo Sport hit the web today, and it reveals even more new cars that are set to arrive in the game while giving us an even better look at the content we already knew about.

Just a week after Codemasters published (and then pulled) a mysterious pizza website full of references to Colin McRae and Petter Solberg, we’ve got a more overt teaser in the form of suggestive posts from a variety of official Twitter accounts.

If you’ve been following GTPlanet and the world of sim-racing for a while, you have seen your fair share of competitive racing esports events.

The latest Gran Turismo Sport “World Tour” event has been quite a show in Salzburg, Austria today. In addition to some great racing, Polyphony Digital used the live stream to show off a freshly-updated Fuji Speedway track and an assortment of new cars, including the NSX Type R, Nissan 300ZX, and Porsche 911 GT3 (997).

A group of the fastest Gran Turismo Sport players from around the world have descended on Salzburg, Austria this weekend to compete in Polyphony Digital’s second “World Tour” exhibition event of the year.

As we recently reported, Polyphony Digital has published slides from two presentations given by employees at CEDEC 2018 in Tokyo. The first covered “Iris”, the ray-tracing lighting system developed in-house exclusively for Gran Turismo Sport.