The 2026 Gran Turismo World Series finally got its season underway over the weekend, and Italy’s first-ever live GT event delivered just about everything you could ask for from an opener.
The Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber crowd was one of the loudest the World Series has ever had, with chants, flags, and cheers. It was all building toward the moment attendees stood and sang the Italian national anthem in unison ahead of the Nations Cup. It was a genuinely moving few minutes that reminds you why these events are better in front of a live audience in the first place, and it set the tone for the rest of the day.
A Hypercar Surprise
Before the racing even started, Polyphony dropped some news of its own.
The June 11 GT7 update will add four current WEC top-class prototypes to the game (the Porsche 963, Peugeot 9X8, Ferrari 499P, and BMW M Hybrid V8) plus a replica of the WEC safety car. It will give us the most complete snapshot of the current Hypercar grid the series has ever had, and it has predictably lit up the forums.
This is also exactly the kind of content drop that pairs nicely with the World Series broadcast format. A surprise announcement landed on a stage in front of a packed crowd, then was immediately amplified by everyone watching the stream at home. It’s a much harder thing to ignore than a dry press release on a Tuesday.
A Bumpy Day for the Viewers Campaign
Speaking of the broadcast: this round saw an unusually high number of people trying to tune in through GT7 itself, likely drawn by the two limited-edition Stealth Model cars tied to the viewer campaign.
The volume was apparently enough to knock parts of the Gran Turismo website offline, leaving many viewers staring at error screens throughout the broadcast. The GTPlanet forums and the live chat lit up with people understandably worried they were about to miss out on cars which, according to Polyphony’s own framing, will never be available anywhere else.
The good news is that Polyphony has acknowledged and reportedly fixed the issue. The qualifying window runs through Monday, June 8, so as long as you load up the broadcast through the in-game banner at some point before that deadline, you’ll still get the cars.
Manufacturers Cup: Serrano Wins, but Rookies Stole the Spotlight
The Manufacturers Cup ran in reverse around the Nürburgring Nordschleife, which was just as disorienting to watch as it is to drive.
Jose Serrano did what Jose Serrano does. The defending champion took pole in the top-six qualifying session by four-tenths over Maximilian Kroll, and the two of them spent the rest of the afternoon glued together.
Kroll got past Serrano, who eventually crawled back the lead. The gap between them rarely opened up beyond half a second, and the AMG of Jack Balding was largely left to its own race in third. When the flag fell, it was Serrano in front, Kroll right behind, and Balding completing the podium.
Here’s the thing, though: Kroll is a debutant. So is Jack Balding, who finished third for Mercedes-AMG. Two of the three drivers on the podium had never raced a live GTWS event before.
That fact prompted some to start talking about a “changing of the guard,” and while that’s a bit premature (Serrano did still win), the broader point isn’t wrong.
Milan was the strongest top-to-bottom showing from new drivers the championship has had in some time. Kroll’s pace was genuinely the equal of Serrano’s. Balding’s qualifying time was good enough to put him ahead of big names like Pol Urra and Kylian Drumont, both of whom started outside the top six. Samuel Moreno made it three rookies in the top ten of the field in his BMW.
These weren’t lucky results. The pace was real, and it suggests the gap between established drivers and the new arrivals is narrower than it has ever been. Whether that holds up over four rounds is the question that should keep Serrano awake at night.
Manufacturers Cup Grand Final Results
- 1 – Porsche (Jose Serrano)
- 2 – Ferrari (Maximilian Kroll)
- 3 – AMG (Jack Balding)
- 4 – Nissan (Mikołaj Sedziak)
- 5 – Mazda (Pol Urra)
- 6 – Audi (Kylian Drumont)
- 7 – Toyota (Benjamin Hencsei)
- 8 – BMW (Samuel Moreno)
- 9 – Volkswagen (Mehdi Hafidi)
- 10 – Subaru (Callum Moxon)
- 11 – Lexus (Antonio Santos)
- 12 – Lamborghini (Miroslaw Kravchenko)
Nations Cup: Urra Capitalizes, Gallo’s Heartbreak, and Moreno’s Cruel Lesson
The Nations Cup format threw three different formats at the drivers in three sessions: a one-lap qualifier in the Red Bull X2019 at Monza (which set the grid for the sprint race), a Mille Miglia-inspired sprint race at Sardegna Road Track A in pre-war classics (which set the grid for the grand final), and the grand final itself, back in the X2019s at Monza for a 27-lap pit-stop strategy puzzle.
The qualifier went to Serrano. The sprint, in a charming mix of historic cars, went to Samuel Moreno on his debut. The 18-year-old Spaniard held off both Urra and Miyazono in one of the cleanest three-way fights we’ve seen, and earned himself the grand final pole as a result.
In the grand final, Moreno led the opening stint cleanly, but on eight he clipped the grass on the entry to Alboreto and spun. That spin alone wasn’t the end of his race, but it began a collapse that included further mistakes, penalties, and eventually a finish well outside the points. A debut weekend that should have ended with a maiden Nations Cup podium ended with him in tenth place.
For Valerio Gallo, the script was painfully familiar. The crowd favorite qualified in fourth and worked his way back into the top three after a brilliant stint on the late-race soft tires. He passed Kaj de Bruin and was hunting Serrano for second place with two laps to go.
Then a track-limits penalty hit him at exactly the wrong moment. Miyazono got past. On the final lap, with the pressure to recover the place, Gallo dropped a wheel onto the grass and spun. He finished ninth. The crowd’s reaction said it all: stunned silence, then a long round of consoling applause as he climbed out of the rig.
Up front, Pol Urra inherited the lead when Moreno spun, and from that point on his race plan was simple: build out a gap on the medium tires while everyone behind argued. Serrano carved his way back from a botched start, climbing from sixth to second after losing time in a first-corner incident with Drumont, but he ran out of laps. Urra crossed the line for his first win since Los Angeles last year. Miyazono inherited third after Gallo’s spin.
It’s a result that puts an all-Spanish front of Urra and Serrano on top of the early standings, with Spain’s third entry (Moreno) buried in the table but clearly fast enough to be in this fight all year if the mistakes get cleaned up.
Nations Cup Grand Final Results
- 1 – Pol Urra (Spain)
- 2 – Jose Serrano (Spain)
- 3 – Takuma Miyazono (Japan)
- 4 – Kylian Drumont (France)
- 5 – Kaj de Bruin (Netherlands)
- 6 – Ryota Kokubun (Japan)
- 7 – S. Cardinal (Canada)
- 8 – Lucas Bonelli (Brazil)
- 9 – Valerio Gallo (Italy)
- 10 – Samuel Moreno (Spain)
- 11 – Guy Barbara (Australia)
- 12 – Adriano Carrazza (Brazil)
What’s Next
The 2026 calendar gets a little unusual from here.
Round 2 lands first on August 15, at Polyphony Digital’s Tokyo studio. It’s a closed-door event, with no spectator tickets and no live crowd. It will be the round which effectively replaces the cancelled Abu Dhabi opener.
The next event in front of a crowd comes on October 3, when the championship heads to the Sands Theatre in Singapore for the first time. That’ll be the next chance to see anything like the kind of atmosphere Milan put on this weekend, before the World Finals return to Tokyo on December 5-6.
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