After becoming the first global one-make esport racing championship in 2019, GT Sport’s GR Supra GT Cup is returning for 2020.
The tournament, first revealed by the Supra’s chief engineer Tetsuya Tada at the 2019 Paris World Tour event, puts players in the driving seat of one of the most-talked about cars of 2019: Toyota’s GR Supra. Players participate in a number of online events across the year, to qualify for a final live event at the end of the season. There, one driver will become the GR Supra GT Cup champion.
For 2019, that champion was Mikail Hizal. In a live event held at the Tokyo Mega Web venue for the Tokyo World Tour, Hizal came out on top with a victory that would foreshadow his world title a month later.
The 2020 event will take place over a similar schedule, with seven online qualifying rounds between April and September leading up to the live event. That’s penciled in for November, but at an as-yet unannounced venue. Given the timing, it seems likely that it will pair up with the GT Sport World Final.
For 2020, the rounds and dates are as follows:
- Round 1 – April 26 – Fuji Speedway (10 laps)
- Round 2 – May 17 – Nurburgring 24h (2 laps)*
- Round 3 – June 7 – Circuit de la Sarthe (4 laps)*
- Round 4 – June 21 – WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca (12 laps)
- Round 5 – July 5 – Autodromo de Interlagos (11 laps)
- Round 6 – July 19 – Tokyo Expressway South Inner Loop (8 laps)
- Round 7 – August 16 – Mount Panorama (8 laps)
While in the first two rounds players only had one opportunity at each race, PD added a second entry for all races from Round 3 onwards. For all but rounds two and three the first entry is at 1800 JST for Asia, 1800 AEST for Oceania, 1600 UTC for Europe, 2100 BRT for South and Central America, and 2000 EST for North America, with the second round 90 minutes later. For the two longer races the slots are 30 minutes earlier.
The recent addition of the 2020 GR Supra creates some interesting tactical implications. Players may use either car and while externally very similar, the new Supra is a category above the older one as the 47hp gain nudges it into the N400 class. Given that BOP is turned on, and the two have very different stats depending on which class the BOP is set to, it may mean that the 2020 has the advantage at some tracks and the 2019 at others.
Toyota Gazoo Racing, which organizes the event, has also revealed that last year’s competition saw around 30,000 racers, with 800,000 people buying the GR Supra road car in the game. In addition, 120,000 people took part in a post-event survey, which awarded an exclusive GT4 version of the car to participants, that TGR will use to guide development of the GR Supra through subsequent model years.
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