Two familiar names got their seasons off to a flying start in the first GT World Series live event of 2025, as Takuma Miyazono for Team Subaru and Jose Serrano won their respective finals by tight margins in last-lap battles.
As with the 2024 season, 2025 will see three preliminary live events in which the qualified finalists — 12 drivers in Nations Cup and 12 brands in Manufacturers — from the online stage earlier this year will fight for World Series points. These will carry through to the World Final in Fukuoka where far more points are available but these performances could become a deciding factor in the destination of the title.
London was a first chance to see form for these high-pressure events in front of a live audience, and it definitely didn’t disappoint.
Gran Turismo World Series London: Manufacturers Cup
The Manufacturers Cup came up first, consisting of qualifying, superpole, and just one race, all in the Gr.3 cars at Tokyo Expressway South Counterclockwise. Players will have been replicating this event in a Time Trial and Daily Race over the last week and a bit, but due to the custom balance of performance (BOP) at these events it’s not necessarily a good guide to what’s fast and what’s not.
That certainly proved the point when Subaru and Mazda got through to the superpole, with Ryota Kokubun just 0.122s behind Shota Sato’s Porsche to snatch 6th, while Mercedes missed the cut in 7th with Kojiro Sasaki twice as far off again at +0.378s.
Only BMW’s Seiya Suzuki improved his lap time in the superpole shoot-out, beating Sato’s Q1 time by a healthy tenth to line up at the front, while Miyazono was a surprise alongside him on the front row — not least because he was 0.03s slower than in the previous session having been fifth.
Suzuki and Miyazono were the only drivers to opt for the soft tires to start the race — with no mandatory tire swap here — and probably aiming for the classic GT live event tactic of building a lead earlier and hoping the squabbles behind them meant late-race defense would be unnecessary.
That certainly seemed to be the case in the polite opening third of the race, as the BMW dragged the Subaru along with it to a five-second advantage over the chasing pack of medium-shod cars — barely covered by five seconds between them — until diving into the odd, mid-lap pits towards the end of lap seven, promoting the Porsche/Lexus/Mazda/Toyota scrap that had become the chase for the podium.
Unexpectedly, Kawakami for defending champion Lexus jumped in two laps later to switch to a new set of mediums, joined by Sato, Sasaki, and Ryosuke Tsujimura in the Honda on the same strategy a lap later. That gave Kokubun the lead in the screaming rotary Mazda, until he also made a stop in the middle of lap 12 to become the first to swap from medium to soft — joined by Kenta Morimoto in the Supra and Yusuke Goto’s Lamborghini.
Suzuki and Miyazono were virtually out of sight by this point, but the tire differential among the next five runners made for quite a barney in the final quarter of the race. With Kawakami and Sato seemingly banking on the last-laps durability of the mediums they were being caught hand over fist by the trio behind them, particularly Kokubun who was the fastest man on track by a wide margin.
However, he found himself almost hemmed in by the Lexus and Porsche ahead, and with nowhere to go he was vulnerable to a lunge from behind, which inevitably came into the container section from Goto in the Lamborghini. The run from there to the hairpin effectively determined the podium as five cars on two tire grades don’t really go into one tunnel and braking zone.
What proved the race’s biggest incident was precipitated by Sato and Goto banging doors in the tunnel. Goto scraped the outside wall, slowing him up and allowing all four past. Approaching the braking zone for the hairpin, Sato tried to follow Kokubun up the inside of the Toyota, but was inadvertently collected by the Lexus, spearing the Porsche into the inside wall and down to last — with Kawakami awarded a three-second penalty for his role in the incident.
That effectively left Kokubun and Morimoto to tussle for the final podium spot, and it was the Mazda that would come out on top as Kokubun simply couldn’t be matched on the soft tires. There was though still the matter of who would win to decide…
After patiently waiting behind the BMW all race long, and saving front tires in the process, Miyazono started to press the issue in the final three laps. He first showed his nose into the hairpin on lap 18, but couldn’t make it stick, before feigning a move in the same spot next time round. On the final lap though, the BMW just ran a car’s-width wide trying to hold too defensive a line and Miyazono needed no more invitation in sending an exquisite pass to finally hit the front.
There he’d stay, to take the first win of the season for the 2020 and 2022 champion team and maximum points. Suzuki’s efforts scored BMW second-place after leading for all but a couple of corners.
Manufacturers Cup Grand Final Results
- 1 – Team Subaru (Takuma Miyazono) – Subaru BRZ GT300 – 20 laps
- 2 – Team BMW (Seiya Suzuki) – BMW M6 GT3 – +0.268s
- 3 – Team Mazda (Ryota Kokubun) – Mazda RX-Vision GT3 – +4.398s
Manufacturers Cup Standings (After One Round)
- 1 – Team Subaru (Drumont, Miyazono, Solis) – 6 points
- 2 – Team BMW (Haywood, Labouteley, Suzuki) – 5 points
- 3 – Team Mazda (Cardinal, Kokubun, Urra) – 4 points
- 4 – Team Toyota (Carrazza, de Bruin, Morimoto) – 3 points
- 5 – Team Nissan (Filho, Okumoto, Sedziak) – 2 points
- 6 – Team McLaren (Kamada/Yamamoto, Mosso, Murphy) – 1 point
Gran Turismo World Series London: Nations Cup
Nations features a qualifying, qualifying race, and race format again this year, with each stage setting the grid for the following one.
The Spanish co-champions from the 2023 team event, Jose Serrano and Pol Urra, set their stalls out early in locking out the front row with the X2019s at Grand Valley Reverse, but the entire field was separated by under half a second in one of the closest sessions we’ve ever seen in a GTWS event. That still only decided who’d start where in a fever-dream race at Le Mans, in Aston Martin Valkyries tuned up to 1,458hp…
It couldn’t have gone any better for the Spanish pair, as a first-corner tangle between third-placed Adriano Carrazza and the two French cars behind immediately created a two-second gap and broke the slipstream to allow them to escape almost right from the start. A luckless Carrazza would find himself squeezed between Thomas Labouteley and Angel Inostroza in the Daytona chicane and turned about, while Inostroza would find himself looking the wrong way too.
Track limit penalties (Le Mans being awkward for them, as most players would attest) would also come into play in a major way, as Kaj de Bruin, Miyazono, Guy Barbara, and Samuel Cardinal would all get the dreaded red dot, with de Bruin’s dropping him further into strife when clipped by Barbara into the Porsche Curves.
Serrano and Urra weren’t distracted by any of this — simply by being too far ahead — as they coasted home to a 1-2, though nearly had a coming-together late on when Urra was a little late on the brakes on the first Porsche curve on the final lap. Drumont would round out the top three after avoiding the chaos around him.
Tire strategy would play a major role in the X2019 race as usual, though the requirements were a little different from previous events. While all three grades were available, the drivers would only need to use any two of their choice — and there’d be some pretty varied takes on this.
All of the top five would start on mediums, with Labouteley the first to go for something different with the hards. Behind him it was only tenth-place de Bruin on the softs and last-place man Cardinal also going for hards.
The Dutch driver was absolutely making that choice work for him in the early stages, carving right up through the field to lead by lap four. In the process though he’d tag Barbara in the overlook hairpin and net a one-second penalty from the stewards — and have to progress back up again. Which he’d do on lap six.
Urra, at this point leading the train back to Miyazono in seventh, wasn’t taking that lying down and retook the lead as the softs waned, but the two would trade places until de Bruin took to the pits on lap eight. That released the top six who were now in their own private battle, though an error from Urra saw him drop down into fourth.
Though trading places on pretty much a corner-by-corner basis, the front grouping seemed to all be allergic to pitting as the race breezed past half distance — defying the pre-race calculations on pit strategy and medium tire life. It was strategy master Miyazono who took the plunge, swapping for hards on lap 17 and triggering the same move from Drumont on the next lap. Gallo and Sasaki though would go a lap longer and, surprisingly, switch to the soft for the final 11 laps.
After an incredible 20 laps on the mediums, Serrano and Urra came in for the softs too, setting up a remarkable fight for the final few laps with two cars on durable hards, two on softs aiming for 11 laps, and the Spanish duo at the back of the pack on the freshest, grippiest tires.
Drumont and Miyazono were sitting ducks early on for Serrano and Urra, bringing the four soft-shod cars together for a thrilling six-lap scrap before that extra tour of tire wear started to toll. Serrano hit the front in relatively short order thereafter, with Urra making a daring dive to follow and stick to his countryman as they began to pull away.
As the laps ticked away, Urra seemed to be biding his time and saving tires to make one solid move that would stick, and it made for a stunning final lap. The first attempt surprisingly came in the chicane on the last lap, but Serrano held track position to hold firm. Another came at the overlook hairpin, as Serrano ran deep on entry, and Urra seemed to have done all the hard work but got crossed up on exit to allow his compatriot back past and keep the lead back up the hill and down to the finish line.
Gallo scored the final podium spot, holding off Sasaki as both faded over the final lap, but remained ahead of Drumont and Miyazono who really needed one more lap for their challenge.
Nations Cup Grand Final Results
- 1 – Jose Serrano (Spain) – Red Bull X2019 Competition – 30 laps
- 2 – Pol Urra (Spain) – Red Bull X2019 Competition – +0.287s
- 3 – Valerio Gallo (Italy) – Red Bull X2019 Competition – +6.668s
Nations Cup Standings (After Two Rounds)
- 1 – Jose Serrano (Spain) – 6 points
- 2 – Pol Urra (Spain) – 5 points
- 3 – Valerio Gallo (Italy) – 4 points
- 4 – Takuma Sasaki (Japan) – 3 points
- 5 – Kylian Drumont (France) – 2 points
- 6 – Takuma Miyazono (Japan) – 1 point
We’ve now got a three-month pause in the calendar before the next live event, which is just a short hop away in Berlin, Germany. Tickets are on sale now for this round, as well as the last of the three preliminary events in Los Angeles.
Taking place on Saturday September 20, Berlin will see the EMEA region representatives for the 12 finalist brands race off in the Manufacturers Cup, followed by the same dozen finalists in the Nations that same evening. Hopefully we’ll see you there!
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