Mashable quietly published an interesting video interview with North American Gran Turismo producer Taku Imasaki earlier this month.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=l1MQFchpmuc

“Red Bull 5G” is a national Japanese gaming competition which seeks to find the country’s best gamers in five different categories: first-person shooters, racing, sports, fighting, and puzzle.

Aside from the recent 2.14 update for Gran Turismo 5 and the GT Academy demo raking in over 1 million downloads, nothing of any real interest has happened this week, at least as far as I’m concerned. That could all change at the drop of a hat though so don’t bury your head in your pillow just yet. Who knows what’s going to happen this weekend. 

Sony and Nissan have formally announced GT Academy 2013 has received over 1 million downloads worldwide as of July 16, just two weeks after the GT6 demo which hosts the competition was released.

The latest Seasonal Events are now live in Gran Turismo 5, and this week’s challenges are all about front-wheel driven cars. Five expert level challenges touring such locations as Autumn Ring Mini and Deep Forest Raceway await, and the rewards are just as high as they’ve come to be in these challenges.

For those of us in the UK still scratching around for the four or five seconds we need to trouble the top 16 and couldn’t make Goodwood last weekend, good news! Four more wildcards are up for grabs at the O2 this weekend.

A new software update for Gran Turismo 5 has been released, version 2.14. At only 13MB in size, it’s even smaller than version 2.13, and once again appears to “fix minor issues” according to the only documented changes published by Polyphony Digital.

In addition to their gameplay session with Lucas Ordoñez, the UK’s Telegraph spent some time walking around the Goodwood Hillclimb course, taking photographs from the exact locations seen in the GT6 Goodwood screenshot pack released last week.

As part of their Goodwood Festival of Speed coverage this weekend, The Telegraph has put together a short video showcasing the Gran Turismo 6 demo on display at the Nissan booth.

Polyphony Digital has announced maintenance for Gran Turismo 5’s online services next week, starting Tuesday, July 16, at 03:00 GMT/UTC (convert to your local time here) and lasting approximately two hours.

Gran Turismo 6 is steadily becoming a more attractive product as the days progress and with the recent reveal of the Goodwood Hillclimb making it’s debut in the upcoming game, that attraction has nearly doubled since the GT Academy demo was released last week.

Gameplay videos of Gran Turismo 6’s newest confirmed circuit, the Goodwood Hill Climb, have finally been released – one of which is a directly-captured video from Polyphony Digital themselves!

The latest Seasonal Events are now available in Gran Turismo 5, featuring the Jaguar XJR-9 LM race car, Toyota 86 GT and both racing and non-racing cars alike. This week’s events step away from the more methodical approach the events took on two weeks ago and instead turn the focus back toward getting the most out of the car/tire combination.

The official UK Gran Turismo website has announced the Goodwood Hill Climb will be featured in Gran Turismo 6.

Since the start of the competition last week, our GT Academy 2013 forum has been buzzing with discussion amongst participants from around the world, sharing tips and tricks on how to get faster and move up the leaderboards.

The special GT6 content which Sony teased as part of their “Greatness Awaits” E3 marketing campaign has now been revealed as a gameplay video and wallpaper download.

EuroGamer’s Digital Foundry closely examines the graphics in today’s video games, offering highly technical analyses of all the 3D imaging techniques which developers use to build the software we play. They’ve carefully documented the performance of GT5 Prologue, the GT5 Time Trial (which hosted GT Academy 2010), and GT5 itself.

Racing by the sand dunes of Zandvoort in Holland, the No.35 Nissan GT-R Nismo GT3 of Lucas Ordonez and Alex Buncombe took second place in class in this afternoon’s main race, bringing the tally of podiums in Nissan’s last three GT3 races to three out of three.