I turned 10 the year the first Gran Turismo came out and I got it for my birthday along with Resident Evil 2 (that was an awesome birthday!) and at that point I only really knew and loved supercars like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti, Cizeta and a few others. The only manufacturers I had not heard of was Dodge, TVR and Subaru and so I got schooled on their awesome cars.
More importantly perhaps was that I learnt that Toyota, Mazda, Mitsubishi are not boring commercial cars but that they all had some serious wheels! The Skyline, GTO, RX-7, Supra were killer and so much so that Gran Turismo 1 is still my fave in the series despite the exclusion of the biggest names in the Supercar world.
Those tracks also were so awesome that I could not have cared less that they were not real.
Thanks to Gran Turismo, I became enlightened about many different kinds of cars both exotic and mundane, fast and slow.