The Mercedes-AMG Motorsport Virtual Championship, an esports series staged across four different racing game titles, returns from today with the initial hot lap qualifying sessions.
Following “Season Zero”, which began in August 2024 and saw some GTPlanet members doing rather well, the series has returned for Season One, with a handful of tweaks that opens the floor to many more people than before.
In total there’ll be five separate championships, each comprising two 24-driver splits — for a combined 240 places available — and running on four different titles. Console players can pick from Gran Turismo 7 and Assetto Corsa Competizione, while PC gamers also have ACC as well as iRacing and Rennsport open to them.
Regardless of your chosen platform you’ll be able to qualify one of two ways. Firstly, each title has a hot-lap qualifier which begins today and runs for a month until July 13. In each case this comprises a time trial at the Monza circuit in the Mercedes-AMG GT3 car.
Additionally there’s two live events at which you can qualify. Both the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Nurburgring 24 Hours will host a “fanbase” with simulators — it’s not made clear which platform, but we’re expecting it to be ACC on PC — where attendees can try their hand.
The top 24 players from each of the five qualifiers — including the two “golden ticket” winners who achieve the best time in the live events — will be allocated into Division One for each game, with a 24-person top split for all but GT7 and Rennsport which will feature two 12-driver leagues. Everyone else who sets a time, whether through qualifiers or the fanbases, is entered into a raffle for the lower Division Two in the same format.
That sets the grids for the online competition, which each of the seven race days featuring a standard event — with practice, qualifying, and the race itself — followed by a “gamified” race that has “challenges” such as gaining the most positions or the fastest lap among bottom-half finishers that may award bonus points. These take place every two weeks across the summer and autumn:
- July 30 – Race Day 1 – Monza
- August 13 – Race Day 2
- August 27 – Race Day 3
- September 10 – Race Day 4
- September 24 – Race Day 5
- October 8 – Race Day 6
- October 22 – Race Day 7 – Spa-Francorchamps
The races themselves vary depending on your chosen platform, rather than being fixed to the courses common to each title as in Season Zero — though each starts at Monza and ends at Spa — even between the PC and console versions of ACC. GT7 and Rennsport are the only events to include fictional tracks, with Lago Maggiore and Alsace in the former and Crest da Cauras in the latter.
If that all wasn’t quite enough, there’ll also be two stages at which there’s promotion and relegation. The top three in each Division Two will be promoted, and the corresponding bottom three from Division One relegated, after the third and fifth race days.
The top three drivers in each division will receive “a small prize” — which in Season Zero consisted of a trophy — while there’s also an F1 track-side experience, GT car track experience, and Mercedes-AMG gaming bundle available for the top three scoring drivers overall across all 240. A fourth prize of a MSI x Mercedes-AMG Motorsport laptop will be given to a driver drawn from a “token” raffle, where racers get an entry token per race completed.
As with 2024’s Season Zero, you’ll need to register for the event on a special page on the Mercedes-AMG website — which requires an account on TheSimGrid — and you’ll need to be part of the event’s Discord channel (a detail that tripped up a lot of people last year) but otherwise entry is open to anyone with the relevant hardware and software aged 16 years or older on July 30 2025.
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