Cars

This guest contribution is by Bryan Heitkotter, 2011 United States GT Academy Champion. As the first US GTA graduate, Bryan has driven a wide variety of vehicles over the years, from the wild Juke-R to the GT3 GT-R. He’s also shared the wheel with fellow GT Academy pupil Nick McMillen. Here, Bryan recounts his experience at the 2015 NISMO Festival.

UPDATE: The “Fugu Z” was scanned by the Polyphony Digital team on November 7, 2017 in Long Beach, CA. It was finally added to Gran Turismo Sport in the game’s 1.31 update, released on December 5, 2018.

It’s been a busy day at SEMA, as Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi toured the show floor visiting all the finalists for this year’s GT Awards.

The Nissan-powered Greaves Motorsport team took the European Le Mans Series LM P2 title today, after finishing in second place in a nail-biting season finale at Estoril in Portugal.

Nissan Concept 2020 Vision Gran Turismo, a concept supercar developed in conjunction with Polyphony Digital Inc., the creators of the racing video game Gran Turismo for PlayStation, is certain to further increase Nissan’s sizable presence in the game and beyond.

This past August, tragedy struck in IndyCar, when Justin Wilson was involved in a fatal accident at Pocono Raceway. It marked the second death in as many months in professional motorsports, with Jules Bianchi passing away the month previous due to injuries he suffered in 2014. In Bianchi’s case, it was the first death related to an on-track accident in F1 since Ayrton Senna’s in 1994; for Wilson, the first since Dan Wheldon in 2011.

Polyphony Digital has shared a new video covering the atmosphere and excitement of one of the world’s largest and most popular endurance races, the Nurburgring 24 Hours.

The #23 Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3 line-up of Alex Buncombe (GB), Katsumasa Chiyo (JAP) and Wolfgang Reip (BEL) has won the Blancpain Endurance PRO Driver’s Championship. Third place in a nail-biting, season-closing race at the Nürburgring in Germany sealed the title win for Nissan after a season of hard racing in what is accepted to be the biggest GT championship in the world.

This year’s winner of the Gran Turismo Award at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is this 1952 Cunningham C-4R Competition Roadster.

Barely a weekend goes by on GTPlanet without us talking about one race or another where a GT Academy winner has gone from playing racing games to driving a real racing cars, so it’s a little unusual to find out that it happens the other way round too.

There’s another massive weekend of motorsport coming up and once again Nissan and GT Academy are front and centre.

Everywhere you look at the moment there’s a GT Academy driver driving something somewhere. Whether it’s the Blancpain Endurance Series in France, the Nissan Micra Cup in Canada or GP3 in Austria, there’s a guy in a white and red suit who used to play racing games for fun sticking it up the sharp end in a Nissan of one kind or another.

Since its inclusion in Gran Turismo 6 was first announced back in 2013, the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed has had a close relationship with the franchise. As many will recall, last year saw the in-game track updated to include the 2014 “Central Feature” sculpture at Goodwood – a soaring art installation that features different manufacturers and changes each year.

NISMO Athlete and 2014 Nissan GT Academy winner Nic Hammann kicks off his first racing season for Nissan in a big way, co-driving with Russian GT Academy champ Mark Shulzhitskiy in an RJN Nissan GT-R GT3 NISMO racer in the first-ever Blancpain Sprint Series event at Moscow Raceway in Russia July 3 to 4.