Sage

You can put any doubts you had about Gran Turismo 5’s 3D support to rest. Taku Imasaki, a U.S. based producer for the game, confirmed that it will feature this new technology.

Jordan Tresson has been announced as the winner of GT Academy 2010. The 21-year-old Frenchman completed a short head-to-head test today on Silverstone’s new Grand Prix circuit against friend and rival Luca Lorenzini. The pair drove five flying laps each in the 420bhp Nissan 370Z GT4 race car that Tresson will now campaign in the 2010 European GT Cup series.

Kazunori Yamauchi was (and actually still is, thanks to Iceland’s volcano) in the UK this past weekend to meet with the GT Academy 2010 winners at Snetterton. That went well, but the first interview to emerge from his visit (which appears to have been removed from AutoBlog UK) has already caused a great deal of teeth-grinding in our forums. Here’s the problem:

If you’re reading this site, you probably know Gran Turismo 5 is a big deal for the PlayStation brand, but we can’t often quantify that into numbers. Data collected by marketing research agency OTX GamePlan, however, gives a peek into stats you know Sony is taking into careful consideration. According to their latest survey, 33% of people who plan on purchasing GT5 don’t yet own a PlayStation 3 console to play it on. In other words, if GT5 sells anywhere close to GT4’s 10.9 million copies, there will have to be several million consoles out the door along with it. For a system that sells around 10 million units per year, that would be healthy increase. Without a solid release date for the game, though, those consoles could be sitting on the shelf for a while…

As we’ve known for a while now, Gran Turismo 5 will include two different damage models – one for production cars, another for “race” cars. “Race” cars will show significant deformation and will have detachable hoods and doors, while production cars would show little more than paint scratches.