Richard Meaden, professional racer and writer for the (awesome) online publication Drivers Republic, was a witness to history last month when he drove alongside GT Academy winner Lucas Ordóñez in the 24 Hours of Dubai.  Meaden eloquently describes the experience of the 24 hour event from a personal, honest point of view in his latest article, and it’s a fascinating read.  He covers the race build-up, paddock drama, trials and tribulations of endurance racing, and complements Ordóñez for his calm head and steady driving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNQJ1T0DJrM

In something that probably won’t come as a surprise to most Gran Turismo fans, a recent study has shown that driving a vehicle of a particular make in a video game makes the player “50% more likely” to consider purchasing a car from that company in the future.  The study, conducted by Dr. Kyle Murray and Robin Ritchie, placed one person in a room with Project Gotham Racing and another in a room with a video feed of the game.  The result:

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In an awesome demonstration of ‘virtual’ driving skills in the real world, GT Academy winner Lucas Ordóñez successfully competed in the 24 Hours of Dubai!  With highly experienced teammates like former F1 driver Johnny Herbert, Alex Buncombe, and Rob Barff, the pressure was on Lucas to keep the lap times low and the car on the track.  He managed to do just that, and despite a mechanical setback, helped the Nissan team finish 9th in their class 451 laps and over a distance of 2431km.

Proper Graphics’ 3D model of a Koenigsegg CCX to Gran Turismo 5’s specifications caused quite a stir.  Not only was it discussed across the web, the accompanying video clip was the seventh most popular on YouTube last week!  Yury Rybakov of the Belarus-based design studio dropped by our forums to help explain exactly why their model looked so much better than what we’ve seen in games so far.  Mr. Rybakov conceeds the Koenigsegg wasn’t processed in real-time like it would be in a game, but it also makes significantly better use of the polygons that it is composed of.  He supports his argument by highlighting several imperfections in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue’s vehicle models that have resulted in incorrect and misaligned surface reflections that most of us have probably missed!

Before you read anything else (and anyone posts this on a forum/blog without proper citation), this Koenigsegg CCX rendering has nothing to do with Gran Turismo 5.  So, what’s it doing on GTPlanet?  ‘Proper Graphics‘, the imaging company who created the model did actually have GT5 in mind, crafting it within Polyphony Digital’s polygon and texture specifications.  As you can see, though, the level of detail is considerably higher than anything we’ve seen in GT5 Prologue, due to the fact that it’s rendered by itself on high-end computer hardware.  A game’s many environmental variables probably consume too much of the PlayStation 3’s processing power to give us anything like this at the moment, but make no mistake – Gran Turismo 6 won’t look much different.

The wildly popular Inter-Forum Timetrial Championship has finally come to a close after 63 days of heated competition and 1,237 submitted times from participants around the world!  The guys from Team GTros ultimately came out on top, with their member Ramon taking the top spot in the individual points standings.  Team GTPlanet and our own driver holl01 came in second in team and individual standings, respectively.  The Germans from Team GTRP round out the podium, and FAK of the Dude Team scored an individual third.  A big thanks goes to all of the Team Captains who kept everyone in order, and especially to GTPlanet’s chief race organizer Sphinx, without whom this competition could have never occurred.

Sony is using Gran Turismo 5 Prologue to power a ‘3D’ tech demo at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Apparently, it’s a pretty impressive new display technology, but don’t get too excited – a Sony representative made it clear this television will not be headed for production any time soon.  Regardless, it’s a pretty cool look at what we could see by the time Gran Turismo 6 comes around…  ArsTechnica has first impressions of the display:

GTPlanet’s inbox has been filled over the past few days with reports that Kazunori Yamauchi is interested in developing a game outside of the Gran Turismo series.  The news apparently comes from an interview with Japanese gaming magazine ‘GeMaga‘, where he also supposedly stated that he ‘would have wanted GT5 to come out in 2009‘.  So, what’s the problem with this story?  Many other news outlets have picked up and ran with the news, but their only reference is this article from PS3Center.net – a site which lost a considerable amount of credibility by participating in the recent rash of misinformation.  PS3Center’s lack of hard details about the source leaves a lot to be desired, and GTPlanet cannot endorse or verify the integrity this information.

GTPlanet monitors news about Gran Turismo on a daily basis.  It’s interesting to watch how a story ‘evolves’ across the web, but when a ‘bad’ piece of news makes the rounds, misinformation can spread far and wide.  That’s exactly what happened with an old  Kazunori Yamauchi interview by Import Tuner.  The interview was significant because Yamauchi mentioned a 2010 release date for Gran Turismo 5.  It’s not too exciting, though, because that’s what he was saying 5 months ago.  GTPlanet has been referenced in many comments by folks who are trying to correct the journalists and bloggers jumping on the ‘news’, so let’s take a look at how everything went down:

On Christmas Day, the GTPlanet Forums hit a milestone, reaching a total of 3,000,000 posted messages.  A huge thanks goes out to everyone in our community who made it possible.  Those millions of messages contain more than just text – they forged new friendships, answered countless questions, and hold massive amounts of data about the Gran Turismo games.  This is a valuable resource to the series’ millions of fans, and I hope to continue growing and moving the site forward into the future.

Many of our regular forum visitors take advantage of our popular GTPlanet Premium subscription service, which removes all advertisements from the site and gives you lots of extra site features.  This time of year, however, we do something different and donate half of our lifetime subscription revenue to the Alzheimer’s Association.  It’s a win-win situation: you get to fight Alzheimer’s, get the best GTPlanet browsing experience, and support the site all at the same time!  To learn more and sign up, check out the full announcement here.

5-time World Rally Champion Sébastien Loeb couldn’t match the digital driving skills of GTPlanet commenter Thanos, who bested Loeb by over a second in the GTbyCitroen competition last weekend.  The Citroen WRC drivers and co-drivers went up against 20 gamers who had stopped by Citroen’s C42 Showcase in Paris and set the fastest laps around High Speed Ring in the company’s radical new concept car.  Ultimately, the winner stepped away with an 80GB PlayStation 3, DFP steering wheel, a copy of GT5 Prologue, a Citroen WRC model car, and a GTbyCitroen t-shirt.  Even the second, third, and fourth place finishers won a PSP, game, and other goodies.  Check out these pictures from the event, or visit PlayScope for more.

As we move into 2009, expect to see some nifty and fresh changes to GTPlanet.  The first is a transition away from our old video platform, and on to something you’ve probably heard of before: YouTube.  Hosting our videos with YouTube offers quite a few advantages.  If you have your own YouTube account, you can subscribe to GTPlanet’s channel and receive regular updates via email when we upload new clips.  The best news, however, is our ability to upload full 720p high-definition video, which we will be embedding here in our news posts whenever we can.

Visitors from France, votre attention s’il vous plaît!  Citroen launched a new competition yesterday, and it could put you head-to-head with World Rally Champion Sébastien Loeb.  Visitors to Citroen’s C42 Showcase on the Champs-Élysées in Paris can hop in to a GT5 Prologue racing pod and set the fastest lap in a GTbyCitroen (of course).  The four fastest drivers get the chance to meet and compete against all of Citroen’s WRC drivers and co-drivers, including Loeb, Daniel Elena, Dani Sordo and Marc Marti in the game.  If you’re interested, though, you’d better act fast – hot laps are accepted until this Thursday, December 18, and the competition itself takes place on December 20, 2008.

We got a pretty big surprise when AutoExpress magazine editors got their hands on the ‘real’ Citroen GT concept and took it for a spin.  They teased us with exciting descriptions of the car’s 580bhp V8 engine sound, but we could only hope for a video – until now!  The guys at a Polish GT fansite managed to capture a segment from a local television show, with a reporter hopping in the passenger seat to for some onboard footage.

An ESPN interview with Gran Turismo series creator Kazunori Yamauchi from SEMA last month slipped under the radar (thanks for the heads-up, Patrik), probably due to the lack of any news or interesting information.  The interviewer is actually a writer for ESPN’s motorsports division and is not part of the games industry, so we can cut him slack for not asking deeper questions about the future of the series.  Still, he managed to get some good quotes from Yamauchi-san: