Polyphony Digital has released the video from Kazunori Yamauchi and Mikail Hizal’s run at the 1000 Miglia. It’s cinematic and beautifully shot, following the pair over the five days and roughly 2,000 kilometers they spent driving classic Toyotas across Italy in June.
Sixty Hours Behind the Wheel
Yamauchi opens the video by making it clear the Miglia is challenging.
“It is certainly not a parade run,” he says. Over five days, competitors cover roughly 2,000 kilometers, which works out to around 60 hours of actual driving, on a route that changes every year and is largely unfamiliar even to veterans of the event.
It’s a genuine race, run on public roads shared with regular traffic, and Hizal (who was pulling double duty as both driver and co-driver) says the balancing act took some getting used to.
“It’s literally like a rally along with all the citizens on the same public road,” he explains, “but at the very same time you have to be careful not to drive too quickly, but at the very same time not to miss the time control.” The schedule, he adds, is packed tight enough that there’s barely room to process what’s happening around you.
Toyota’s First Trip to the Mille Miglia
This was the first time a Japanese manufacturer had entered cars in a 1000 Miglia event. The company brought five cars spanning six decades of its history, from a first-generation Crown RS, a Sports 800, 2000GT, A80 Supra, and a Lexus LFA.
Yamauchi and Hizal shared the Supra, but they weren’t the only Toyota crew on the road.
Ryotaro Shimizu, Toyota’s chief engineer for the program, describes fielding ten drivers total. “It’s been a kind of dream for me, to run in the Mille Miglia,” he says in the video. “Here we are with 10 drivers from Toyota and Yamauchi-san and Mikail. I think we made a great team.”
Why Toyota Could Even Enter
None of this would have been possible under the Mille Miglia’s normal rules, which restrict entry to cars built between 1927 and 1957.
The 1000 Miglia Gran Turismo Experience, the offshoot event Polyphony organized specifically for this, opened the door to cars built after 1958 instead.
Francesca Parolin, COO of 1000 Miglia S.r.l., frames the whole collaboration as years in the making. “We had a dream, 1000 Miglia and Gran Turismo, and we started working and we turned that dream into a project, and that project into a reality,” she says, describing it as merging “the real driving simulator with the real 1000 Miglia race, to create something unique.”
She calls the expanded event a “traveling museum,” and says welcoming Japanese cars for the first time is about keeping the past alive while bringing it into the future.
It drives home why Yamauchi cares about this event in the first place. In the video, he traces his own interest in classic cars back to making Gran Turismo, saying it really does come down to the simple pleasure of seeing that many beautiful cars driving together.
Yamauchi’s Love for the 1000 Miglia
This wasn’t Yamauchi’s first Mille Miglia. He ran it in 2018 behind the wheel of a Mercedes, and again in 2019 alongside GT champion Igor Fraga in an Alfa Romeo 4C.
What comes through in this video, more than in past coverage, is how much he values the event for its human side as much as the driving. “Cars are a mirror of the people who drive them,” he says. “It is not only about the competitors. There are media people, sponsors, and many different cars driving the same route. That is unique to this event, and I enjoy seeing the human stories behind it.”
Hizal, for his part, sounds like someone still processing what he just did. “Personally I kind of struggle to find any words which can describe this event perfectly,” he says near the end of the video. “It’s like a total different world.” He calls out the mentality of some of the other competitors as “really, really crazy” and says he hopes to do it again.
Whether that happens depends on Toyota and Polyphony keeping this partnership going past its first year, but between Yamauchi’s own history with the event and the reception the inaugural running got, there’s no obvious reason for either side to walk away.
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