It’s been interesting and entertaining to watch America’s fastest Gran Turismo players make the transition from virtual to reality over the last four weeks, and now the final episode of GT Academy on Speed TV airs this Tuesday, October 18th at 10PM Eastern Time. If you haven’t been able to watch, don’t worry – all the episodes are right here.

Since Amar212 offered our first hands-on look at Gran Turismo 5’s new DLC content, he’s been hard at work with R0M of TaxiGamer capturing more top-quality videos of Spa Francorchamps which showcase the track’s weather changes. You can watch a few of the clips on YouTube below, or head over to TaxiGamer to grab the direct, 60FPS, 720p video files.

GT series guru Amar212 has managed to unlock Gran Turismo 5’s upcoming DLC, and has shared the very first hands-on videos of Spa Francorchamps on behalf of GTPlanet and his own Croatian GT community, GTSurgeons. Amar is documenting his discoveries here in our forums, and I’ll continue updating this blog post as he goes over all the new content.

Last weekend, 2010 GT Academy winner Jordan Tresson became the second of Nissan’s graduates to win an international championship. Along with his RJN Motorsport team mates, Alex Buncombe and Chris Ward, he took the Nissan 370Z to the GT4 title in Sunday afternoon’s season-closing Blancpain Endurance Series race at Silverstone.

Hot on the heels of the massive Gran Turismo 5 Spec 2.0 update, Polyphony Digital has just released all the juicy details on the game’s first batch of DLC, or “downloadable content”. It will all be available to purchase via the PlayStation Store, starting October 18th. Here’s a closer look at what’s coming:

Gran Turismo 5’s biggest update yet, Spec 2.0, is here! It weighs in at exactly 1192 MB, and is available now at no charge – just load up your game and put your Internet connection to work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcI-rHO0yko

Hot off the heels of the formal Gran Turismo 5 Spec 2.0 announcement, Polyphony Digital has just made two new Time Trial and Drift Trial events available in the game:

Kazunori Yamauchi has been sharing a boatload of new details via Twitter this morning on the previously announced Gran Turismo 5 Spec 2.0 Update coming later this month. Here’s an overview of what we can expect from 2.0, which will be made available to everyone for free:

The Signatech Nissan team has won the 2011 Intercontinental Le Mans Cup LMP2 title after a strong finish in yesterday’s Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta, USA.  The team started the season focused on a single goal: to win the title.  The fact that it is ‘mission accomplished’ with one more race remaining is testament to the work that has been put in by every single member of the team.

Fulfilling his pledge to make important Twitter posts in English, Kazunori Yamauchi has just announced some interesting plans if Sebastian Vettel wins the 2011 F1 World Championship:

A new Seasonal Event has been made available in Gran Turismo 5, featuring Japanese cars from the 1990’s with no more than 450PP at the following tracks:

The GT community has been eagerly awaiting news of the next significant update following last month’s announcement hinting at new content and features for us this fall. According to a very rare English-language tweet from Kazunori Yamauchi this morning, that new content and features will be a “Spec 2.0” update to the game in October and downloadable content shortly after:

Following up from the announcement last week, the leader boards for the Mercedes Live Race Seasonal Event have now been reset, and a few minor changes have been made to the Top Gear Test Track via the latest Gran Turismo 5 update.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qaTfP1RWSM

Each year at SEMA in Las Vegas, Sony hosts the “Gran Turismo Awards” – a competition with one very important judge (Kazunori Yamauchi), who selects a car on display at the show for inclusion in a GT game.