The festive season is starting, Mariah Carey is warming up her lungs, and there’s a new set of GT Sport Daily Races to get your week underway. This week’s three races have quite the variety of speed and grip, with plenty to keep you occupied for the next seven days.
Race A has the least of both, with a one-make event featuring one of the most popular city cars in the world: the FIAT 500. You’ll be racing the modern interpretation of the car, with its retro design based on the second-generation Panda, with the engine up front.
A small car works best at a small track, and it’ll be the shortest variant of Autodrome Lago Maggiore playing host this week. You’ll race the 500 — in stock power and weight, and on the Sports Hard tires — for five laps of the mile-long Center layout.
There’s more typical GT Sport fare over in Race B, which sees the GT3-like Gr.3 machines taking to the track. The usual pecking order will be a little different this week though, as the circuit is the fictional Tokyo Expressway East circuit, with its enormous main straight. It’s likely that this will be an all-McLaren F1 GTR affair.
One curve ball here is that it’s the Inner Loop layout, rather than the usual Outer Loop. That means the main straight runs in the opposite direction, to the right-handed hairpin as the first turn, then back the wrong way along the furthest section on the other side of the carriageway into a double-left final turn.
This week’s final race takes you to Brazil, once the home of the last race of the F1 season. There’s a pretty appropriate car for the race too, with the fictional Gran Turismo F1500T-A — a recreation of a mid-1980s 1.5-liter turbo F1 car, similar to GT6’s Lotus 97T.
As well as the unique challenge of this rather peaky powertrain, the 14-lap race has some other special considerations. That starts with… well, the start. This week you’ll be subject to the rarely seen false start check version of the grid start.
From the moment the final red light comes on, you’ll have control of your car, but you’ll need to keep it static — on either the brakes or the handbrake — until the lights go out or you’ll end up with a slowdown penalty that applies for roughly as long after the start as the amount of time by which you jumped it.
Secondly, there’s also mandatory tires this week. You’ll need to use both the Racing Medium and the Racing Hard during the race, or you’ll face a one-minute penalty added to your race time. With 8x tire wear making it feel like a 300-mile race for your rubber, you’ll need to find the right balance between speed and tire life to win.
These three races will run through to Monday December 6, when another set will replace them.
Race A
- Track: Autodrome Lago Maggiore – Center, 5 laps
- Car: FIAT 500 1.2 8v Lounge SS ’08 – Provided Car
- Tires: Sports Hard
- Start Type: Grid Start
- Fuel use: Off
- Tire use: Off
Race B
- Track: Tokyo Expressway – East Inner Loop, 4 laps
- Car: Gr.3 – Garage Car
- Tires: Racing Medium
- Start Type: Rolling Start
- Fuel use: Off
- Tire use: Off
Race C
- Track: Autodromo de Interlagos, 14 laps
- Car: Gran Turismo F1500T-A – Garage Car
- Tires: Racing Medium*, Racing Hard*
- Start Type: Grid Start, False Start Check
- Fuel use: 2x
- Tire use: 8x
*denotes mandatory tire
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