Kyle Patrick

Senna TV, a channel dedicated to all things Ayrton-related, was in Japan recently to interview Polyphony head Kazunori Yamauchi. While talk naturally revolves around the legendary F1 driver, eagle-eyed Gran Turismo fans are treated to a few brief glimpses into Gran Turismo Sport, including our first look at future hardware in action.

Today seems to be full of surprises. The unusual Porsche avatars on Xbox are one thing, but a free edition of an existing game is something different altogether. Hot on the heels of the news that the game has sold two million copies, Project CARS – Pagani Edition launches today, exclusively on Steam.

Paris Games Week 2016 got underway yesterday. For Gran Turismo fans, the event holds significance, for it was at last year’s expo that the latest chapter in Polyphony’s racing franchise was first introduced. With 366 days since that initial reveal, we’re looking back to get an idea of what’s changed since then, and — thanks to a delay pushing the title into 2017 — where GT Sport is heading.

It’s been an arduous week, but it all came to a head earlier today at the 2016 GT Academy International Race Camp. With a two drivers from each region remaining, the last event would see all six teams battling it out on track in identically-prepped 370Z race cars. In the end, it would be Johnny Guindi Hamui, a student from Mexico, that would be crowned champion, but not without a fight.

The men and women over at Slightly Mad Studios had cause for celebration this week, as their 2015 multi-platform sim racer hit another sales threshold. Project CARS first crossed the seven-figure mark shortly after launch in June 2015, and has now doubled that amount to two million.

It’s all been building to this. Today will see one person crowned the 2016 GT Academy International champion, beginning their path to becoming a race car driver as part of the Nissan Driver Development Program. Less than three months later, the winner will be making their competitive debut alongside Jann Mardenborough at the 2017 24 Hours of Dubai in January. You can watch it all unfold above, starting at 14:00 Silverstone time (click here to convert).

We’re only hours away from the first seven Porsches arriving in players’ hands in Assetto Corsa. As detailed last week, PC players will be getting the first crack at the Stuttgart manufacturer, with PS4 and XB1 owners slated to receive Porsche Pack Volume 1 in November.

Over the course of the past few months, the qualifying rounds of GT Academy 2016 have quietly taken place across the globe, as thousands of potential competitors took their best shots using a pre-release version of GT Sport. Six regions were earmarked for International Race Camp (Australia, Indonesia, Mexico, North Africa, Philippines, and Thailand), and after all the dust had settled, six finalists were selected from each to represent their team in Silverstone.

Thrustmaster’s latest wheel has had a quiet debut on none other than e-commerce giant Amazon.com. While not an entirely new product, the T300 GT Edition nonetheless features a few unique changes to the regular T300 RS formula (read our review of that wheel right here).

Last month, the Weekly Race Series organizers wrapped the successful GT300 Triple Mix Championship’s first bracket. Founded on the idea that every racer would have to drive each of the three available cars over the three race weekends, the response was so positive that the concept has been extended to cover a further two brackets.

The season finale of the Pirelli World Challenge took place last earlier this month at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. While the hunt for the title was essentially a two-horse race between McLaren pilot Alvaro Parente and Porsche driver Patrick Long, few would have predicted quite how the final standings would shake out. Parente emerged victorious, snatching the title from the 2011 winner as well as putting an end to Johnny O’Connell’s four-year-strong title run with Cadillac.

There’s no real way to dance around it: engine sounds have not been one of Gran Turismo’s strong points, historically. While a few of the 1200+ cars in GT6 howled and growled authentically, the majority left a lot to be desired for many players. This latest video, straight from the floor of the Paris Motor Show, could be a sign of those days drawing to a close.

This week’s Deals With Gold offers on the Xbox Store focus heavily on our genre of choice. With Forza Horizon 3 garnering the lion’s share of attention for the franchise right now, Microsoft is offering substantial deals on most of the older Forza games and DLC in the lineup, while 2015’s Need For Speed is also available for a fraction of its original price.

Unless you call a particularly large chunk of Earth that you reside under “home”, you’ve by now heard that Gran Turismo Sport has been delayed to 2017. The news meant players looking forward to experiencing the first current-gen GT game this holiday season would miss out, but word out of Johannesburg suggests the wait may be a comparatively short one in the world of Gran Turismo delays.

Kunos Simulazioni is certainly making the most of its deal with Porsche, at least in terms of pre-release hype. Just last week, Marco Massarutto teased the entire contents of the first of three Porsche packs scheduled to land in Assetto Corsa before the end of 2016. Over the weekend, he moved onto Volume 2, sharing an image of 718’s, both old and new.

After a long wait, PlayStation VR will be landing on shelves across the globe this Thursday, October 13. In a surprising twist, Sony has opted to show off Gran Turismo Sport as a part of the new accessory’s launch media blitz. Despite a delay pushing the title into 2017, and no public examples of the game’s VR capabilities before now, you can catch it mixed in with the other immersive experiences in the launch trailer above.

The racing season is coming to a close for a lot of circuit-based series over the next few weeks. But pesky things like sub-zero temperatures or snow banks the size of small children don’t put a stop to the World Rally Championship. With three races left in the 2016 season, the official game of the series is now available on all major platforms.

Teasing. The slow reveal. Whatever you want to call it, we’d like to submit the latest image from Kunos Simulazioni’s Marco Massarutto as a textbook example. Originally shared on his personal Facebook page, the image up above shows the first seven Porsches set to land in Assetto Corsa, blurred enough to not make the exact contents obvious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryI-Dh01Emo

The penultimate round of the Pirelli World Challenge took place a few weeks ago at the sunny, rolling hills of Sonoma Raceway. Continuing a trend set by GT Academy grad Bryan Heitkotter at the previous race weekend in Utah, veteran GM racer Johnny O’Connell swept both races in California in his bright red Cadillac ATS-V.R.