The second of the four live Gran Turismo World Series is coming up on us fast, with the racing heading to a brand new venue again this weekend in Berlin.
Unlike our Round 1 location, in the United Kingdom, Germany has not only hosted GTWS live events before but actually staged the very first one — way back in 2018 when it was still the World Tour. In fact the Nurburgring hosted both previous German events and was set to bring a third in 2020 before that year’s other events put paid to it.
The German capital is therefore making its debut in the series, as indeed are all four host cities in the 2025 championship, and with only one of the three preliminary rounds behind us everything is still finely poised.
London saw some incredible racing with two events decided by overtakes on the final lap — one successful, and one not quite so much — and with less than a third of a second between the top finishers, so we’ll be hoping to see more of the same.
The 12 drivers in the Nations Cup will be resuming their on-track battle with Spain’s Jose Serrano just leading countryman Pol Urra by a single point, ahead of 2021 World Champion Valerio Gallo of Italy in third. These dozen drivers will remain the same across all four events.
Meanwhile the team-based Manufacturers Cup will see a driver swap to the qualifiers from the Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) region — except at Mercedes, where Americas representative Lucas Bonelli will sub in for Noah Lanuza.
That could mean a shake-up in the order which currently sees Subaru leading the way courtesy of talisman Takuma Miyazono. Kylian Drumont will take the wheel this time, as he fights with fellow French driver Thomas Labouteley in second-placed — and defending champion — BMW. Third-place team Mazda gets Pol Urra, while the Toyota squad in fourth right now has Kaj de Bruin; it’s a pretty stacked grid.
While London’s BBC Television Centre was probably the most famous individual building to host the GT World Series, Berlin’s Uber Eats Music Hall is one that will be less familiar. Built in 2018 as part of an expansion of the then-Mercedes Arena, the hall was built to provide an additional, smaller entertainment venue within the same park.
Ride-sharing service Uber picked up the naming rights to the area in March 2024, with the main arena and site renamed to the Uber Arena and Uber Platz, while the smaller venue was rebranded under the Uber Eats banner.
While smaller, the Music Hall is still able to host up to 4,500 patrons depending on configuration, making it the largest single venue to date. An alternative layout can still host half that, although we’d imagine that there’ll be a specific setup for the GTWS which usually brings 500-800 attendees.
That said, tickets are still available and again in the single ticket format: one ticket gets you in to view the whole event from beginning to end. Premium Tickets, guaranteeing seating in the first five rows, are sold out, but the €30 “Standard Ticket” is still available — and discounted tickets for under-18s are also available. Attendees should be seated by 1345 UTC (1545 CEST), with the event getting underway at 1400 UTC and running through to 1930 UTC.
The bonus events keyed to the evening’s activities return for 2025, with the Berlin rewards announced a couple of weeks back.
Anyone who’s been keeping up with the GTWS over the last couple of seasons will likely know how they work already, but if you haven’t you’ll be able to earn in-game credits and free cars — though one is more involved an affair than the other.
In either case you’ll need to head into a special portal within GT7 itself. To win the cars you only need to click on the “Watch Stream (Entry Available)” button in the Viewers Gift area, any time between the stream start (1400 UTC and 1700 UTC respectively) and 0900 on Monday October 6.
You don’t even need to watch the stream this way, as merely clicking on the button suffices, and you’ll earn the Gr.3 car of the winning team in Manufacturers Cup and a Porsche 962 in a special livery appropriate to the winning country in Nations Cup.
A second “Predict the Winner” portal does pretty much what it says. You’ll need to predict which one of the 12 racers in each event will win the final race in Berlin, and you’ll earn 1,000,000cr for each one you get correct.
That’s not going to be an easy task, but you have right up until the start of the final race in each event to make your pick, so feel free to watch all of the qualifying first to get a handle on who’s on form.
With the series heading to the heart of Europe, there’s likely to be plenty of GTPlanet members in attendance — as well as GTPlanet itself — so feel free to drop into our discussion thread to say hi!
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