Motorsports

Australia’s prime racing circuit hosted an absolute thriller over the weekend which saw Tekno McLaren take the title, despite harsh competition from defending champions Nissan and a few issues faced along the half-day event. The driver team of Shane Van Gisbergen, Alvaro Parente and Jonathon Webb faced a car break-down and drive-through penalty, which threatened their chances of domination by pushing them down to 3rd in the closing stages of the endurance race.

A fight to the finish was what fans wanted last weekend, and receive one they certainly did. As the season opener, the Daytona 24 served as an excellent sign of things to come, a day-long sprint with record-setting wins in the Prototype and GTLM categories.

This weekend sees the international motorsport season kick off with a bang, as the 54th running of the Rolex 24 at Daytona starts the ball rolling for another bumper year of global sportscar action. The twice round the clock Florida classic will be the first event for IMSA’s newly renamed WeatherTech Sportscar Championship, as a grand total of 54 cars, many of which are brand new additions to the field, take the green flag on Saturday afternoon.

Back in the summer, a 26-year old postal delivery driver took part in a little competition you may have heard of: GT Academy. This van-driving man – by the name of Matt Simmons – would go on to win the International Region GT Academy competition. In the article linked, we mentioned Simmons was entering the usual post-Academy 3-month training program that Nissan puts each winner through, in preparation for the Dubai 24 Hours race in January. That’s not the case anymore, however.

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.

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.

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.

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.