Just as he has done almost all season long, Spain’s Jose Serrano has overpowered his rivals with a clean sweep in Fukuoka to win the Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025.
It’s a second title in three seasons for Serrano, who was part of the victorious Team Spain squad in Barcelona back in the experimental 2023 calendar, but a first solo crown will likely be a lot sweeter for the Spaniard.
Not only that, it caps off a trophy-laden weekend for Serrano, who also became the first player since Takuma Miyazono in 2020 to do the one-season Manufacturers/Nations double after winning for Porsche in yesterday’s event.
Serrano had gone into the finals as a firm favorite for the Nations Cup title, after putting in an almost perfect set of results in the three preliminary live events to lead his countryman Pol Urra by five points. The finals though offered a different kind of pressure and many, many more points.
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Race 1
We’ve often seen the first race in these events being a 12-car draft affair, with players picking from tuned road cars in order of their initial qualifying. 2025 saw a repeat of that, but rather than road cars it was a grid of prototypes to create essentially a highlights package of 30 years of top-tier sports car racing.
To get there we needed a qualifying session first, which was topped by regular time trial victor Kaj de Bruin. He guided the F3500-B around the new Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve a mere five-hundredths ahead of first-time finalist Samuel Cardinal, ahead of four champion drivers. That gave de Bruin first pick and he went for the Toyota GT-ONE, ordinarily in Gr.2 but with the cars subject to a custom BOP.
That was the high point for de Bruin though. As the cars behind him clustered into Spa’s La Source, he caught a tap off Kylian Drumont’s squeezed Nissan which sent him way off track and dropped down to third on the rejoin. An unseen kerfuffle through Les Combes caused further plummeting, alongside fellow front-row driver Cardinal.
The net result of all of this saw Serrano hit the front with Drumont in tow and a handsome gap over third-placed Takuma Sasaki, doing battle in the Porsche 919 with Angel Inostroza’s Audi R18, and the Group C Mazda and Sauber of Takuma Miyazono and Pol Urra.
Further back a major incident affected the entire back half of the grid. The crash was precipitated by Valerio Gallo aiming to cut back on de Bruin in La Source, but on exiting the corner the Italian former champion made contact with the side of the Toyota. With the field four-wide at this point, de Bruin slid the tail into Guy Barbara’s Mazda LM55, which itself hit Thomas Labouteley’s Toyota GR010, spinning both cars out of contention. Labouteley would pit-in at the end of the lap, seemingly to DNF, but resumed a lap later.
We now had three distinct packs, with the lead pairing followed by the Group C/2016 foursome, and the rest trailing. At the front, Drumont couldn’t keep close enough to the high downforce Peugeot through the twisty sections to make the Nissan’s raw speed count, with Serrano taking a largely comfortable win. Miyazono would round out the podium after starting the last lap in sixth but powering past the 2016 cars on the Kemmel Straight and outbraking Urra in the Sauber into the final Bus Stop.
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Race 1 Results
- Jose Serrano (Spain) – Peugeot 908 HDI ’10 – 8 laps
- Kylian Drumont (France) – Nissan R92CP ’92 – +0.969s
- Takuma Miyazono (Japan) – Mazda 787B ’91 – +6.973s
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Standings (After Race 1)
- Jose Serrano (Spain) – 29 points
- Pol Urra (Spain) – 19 points
- Kylian Drumont (France) – 16 points
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Race 2
That brought the action back to Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve and the new F3500-B as the 12 drivers lined up for more points and to sort the grid out for the Grand Final. Or rather 11 drivers, with Labouteley absent from the grid for unknown reasons after a torrid first race.
This 17-lap run would require a change of tire grade at a single pit stop, with free choice of starting compound that saw three of the top four — Drumont the exception — on the softest tire and all of the rest but Carrazza in tenth on the medium.
If the second lap of Race 1 was chaos, it had nothing on the first corner of Race 2. In the standing start, those soft-shod runners came off the line best with Miyazono past Drumont before the braking zone. However Urra, the third on softs, looked to completely misjudge the braking and hoofed Drumont off the inside.
Forced into cutting the corner (and getting an automated penalty for it), the French driver looked as if he’d safely rejoined and allowed Serrano and Miyazono past, but getting back onto the power on the cold and dirty mediums he half-span into the outside wall before coming back over to the inside in the braking zone for the chicane. The narrow circuit doesn’t allow much room for maneuver, and the net result was just about everyone from fifth down being involved or at least checked up in the mayhem.
Urra, who did escape in fourth, was tagged with a three-second penalty — which seemed harsh, given that it was a simple nose-to-tail error and the lack of penalties in Race 1 for the hit on de Bruin and the later lap two chaos — but after serving it he was able to use the tire differential to get himself back up to third before the first stops.
While Serrano and, to a lesser extent, Miyazono were gone by this point, a stellar defense from Gallo to keep soft-shod Carrazza behind him placed the 2021 champion in prime position for a podium. Emerging just three seconds down on Urra and with the softer tires, it was only a matter of time before they met. Three laps was all it took, with Gallo taking the spot in an unorthodox place into the turn eight/nine chicane.
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Race 2 Results
- Jose Serrano (Spain) – Gran Turismo F3500-B – 17 laps
- Takuma Miyazono (Japan) – Gran Turismo F3500-B – +5.172s
- Valerio Gallo (Italy) – Gran Turismo F3500-B – +10.151s
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Standings (After Race 2)
- Jose Serrano (Spain) – 41 points
- Pol Urra (Spain) – 26 points
- Takuma Miyazono (Japan) – 25 points
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Grand Final
With a very healthy 15-point gap now, Serrano could afford to take it a little easy: any finish of sixth or better would secure the title even if countryman Urra could get past the 2021 and 2020/2024 champions ahead and take victory.
That of course meant going for the aggressive, softs-first strategy adopted by the entire top four — and indeed the pack lined up in tire order with four soft runners followed by four mediums, then the now-three at the tail on hards.
A relatively steady opening for the front four saw Miyazono drop back a little behind Gallo and Urra, but the Nurburgring bit pretty hard soon after as Serrano made an uncharacteristic mistake at Eiskurve, sliding the X2019 into the middle of the track.
In attempting to go around the outside of the dramatically slowed car, Gallo went to the right but misjudged it and dropped into the unforgiving verge. Urra inherited the lead, from Serrano and Miyazono, with Gallo falling well down the order.
Despite that wiggle, the lead trio were still making time on the soft tires and dived in at the end of lap two. Interestingly their strategies diverged at this point, with Urra and Miyazono switching to the medium tire and topping off the tanks while Serrano went for hards and — despite using more fuel over the opening stint — short-fueled it to emerge well over five seconds ahead.
Drumont and Sasaki inherited the lead as the front-running cars on mediums, while all of the hard-running cars also stopped at the end of lap two to ditch the uncooperative rubber. When the four remaining cars stopped a lap later, all the medium-starting cars were now on hards and vice versa as they looked for a two-lap sprint on soft rubber at the end.
Even with the tire disadvantage, Serrano was maintaining his lead over Urra and Miyazono behind him — likely aided by the fact he was no longer punching a hole in the air for his two rivals who were also in their own fight for the championship podium. He’d still need to take a longer second stop to account for additional fuel though, and indeed came in at the end of lap four on whatever the digital equivalent is for fumes.
Sure enough it was a long old stop, with more than a minute spent waiting for the tank to almost be topped off, and the champion-elect emerged plumb last though with everyone else owing one more pit stop.
It’d be another seven minutes until we found out quite how this plan would work out, as every single other car pitted for the final time: three on hards and seven on softs for the final two laps. The answer was that Serrano would be the same five seconds down on Urra and Miyazono as he had been ahead but this time with the tire advantage to the cars in front. However there was a potential thorn: Drumont on the softs, just five seconds back…
While fifth place would be enough, Serrano was off after the lead duo like a man possessed and was past Urra through Hohe Acht on the penultimate lap, into the slipstream of Miyazono down Dottinger Hohe. He didn’t even need the full GP circuit to hit the front, passing the two-time champion into the final chicane before the Nordschleife.
With no more errors, it was essentially a lap of honor of the Nordschleife for Serrano, coming home some five seconds ahead of Miyazono who just fended off Urra — who appeared to run out of fuel just before the finish for second. Guy Barbara, despite misfortunes in earlier races, nabbed fourth from Drumont for his best Grand Final finish ever, as Sasaki rounded out the top six.
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 – Grand Final
- Jose Serrano (Spain) – Gran Turismo X2019 Competition – 7 laps
- Takuma Miyazono (Japan) – Gran Turismo X2019 Competition – +5.831s
- Pol Urra (Spain) – Gran Turismo X2019 Competition – +7.909s
Gran Turismo World Series Nations Cup 2025 Final Standings (Top Six)
- Jose Serrano (Spain) – 65 points
- Takuma Miyazono (Japan) – 45 points
- Pol Urra (Spain) – 42 points
- Kylian Drumont (France) – 34 points
- Valerio Gallo (Italy) – 31 points
- Takuma Sasaki (Japan) – 26 points
The racers will hardly have time to catch breath now, with a traditional, year-end champions’ invitational at Polyphony Digital headquarters looming before a surprisingly early start for the 2026 season. It’s likely that the top three will again qualify automatically, but chances are we’ll see them online too.
That’ll all get underway with two, six-round qualifiers for the two championships starting in January, to set the fields for the first live event in Abu Dhabi at the end of March — for which tickets are on sale now. We don’t yet know the exact count of events and locations, but we’re expecting that all will be revealed in March.
In the meantime, congratulations to two-time Nations and first-time Manufacturers Cup champion Jose Serrano, on a weekend where he proved he’s the dominant force in Gran Turismo’s esports series right now!
See more articles on Gran Turismo World Series.
