Esports

The Forza Racing Championship kicked off earlier this week with the 2015 Mustang GT as the first featured car. In the Elite Series, players were challenged to take their pony car around the turns of Monza in a dedicated Rivals event.

After announcing the details of Season 1 last week, Turn 10 launches the Forza Racing Championship today. This week focuses on the 2015 Mustang GT, with Elite Series players heading to Monza in search of the fastest single lap time, while Open Series drivers will take to a variety of tracks in the Leagues event.

GT Academy 2016 kicked off just over a month ago in various Asian territories. Now, it’s swinging down to the country that will play host to another racing game this year: Australia.

The 2016 Spa 24 Hours endurance event recently finished with the #99 BMW M6 GT3 from ROWE Racing team claiming the victory after 531 laps. Variable weather conditions and several unforeseen pace interruptions caused enough anxiety to make the race entirely unpredictable.

After weeks of teasing, Turn 10 has unveiled its bid for the burgeoning eSports segment. Dubbed the Forza Racing Championship, the ESL-hosted event will be open to all Forza Motorsport 6 players, with numerous prizes up for grabs. At the top of the pile is a brand new 2017 Focus RS, provided by the first season’s title sponsor.

The pioneer behind Gran Turismo’s own ‘gamer-to-racer’ programme, ‘GT Academy’, has now turned his focus to creating a professional virtual motorsport team set to take on competitive gaming. This past weekend, Darren Cox launched ‘eSports+Cars’, a foray into bridging the virtual and real-world divide in motorsport together – an ambitious, regulated team that competes and operates at the same standard expected in real-life motorsport.

Gran Turismo’s immensely successful GT Academy programme has started to roll out it’s preliminary rounds across Asia as it reaches it’s 8th year in competition. The hunt for new racing drivers start with Sony and Nissan hosting live events across Thailand and the Philippines. The top 20 drivers who set the fastest times will progress to the next round. The car/track combo is the Nissan GT-R 2017 on Tokyo Expressway, PD’s newest street circuit for the series.

Ginx TV, the UK’s dedicated gaming channel, has undergone a re-branding and change of focus: becoming the world’s first dedicated eSports TV channel. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, Ginx eSports will provide a programme mix that will take footage from eSports tournaments and other relevant events to provide gamers and mainstream viewership alike with the latest from the ever-growing eSports gaming scene.

Yes, it’s been officially confirmed on the NISMO Facebook profile page: GT Academy has enrolled into another season of close online competitions that will try to track down talented drivers over the next several months. Although a significant number of countries won’t be supported on the initial run of the 2016 season, players residing in few select ones will get an exclusive chance to test-drive the upcoming GT Sport before everyone else.

GT Academy, the notable racing program made as a result of cooperation between Nissan and PlayStation, quickly gained recognition for offering PlayStation and Gran Turismo users an opportunity to take part in real racing. Currently running strong in its 8th year of existence, the program has life in it yet as, according to recent news, there are more things to come.

What a difference a month makes. When we last caught up with the Pirelli World Challenge after Round 7 (here), Johnny O’Connell and Michael Cooper were leading the points tally in their pair of Cadillac ATS-V.R’s, followed closely by Alvaro Parente in a McLaren 650S GT3. A significant gap existed between Parente and the two Porsche drivers that rounded out the top five – Michael Lewis and Patrick Long. 2011 GT Academy winner Bryan Heitkotter sat in ninth, while his teammate JD Davison slotted in directly behind Patrick Long.

We often hear of people transitioning to professional racing thanks to video games. The GT Academy initiative is perhaps the most obvious example, but it’s hardly the only one. Slightly Mad Studios, the studio behind Project CARS, has released a documentary focusing on the inspiring story of Nicolas Hamilton’s career progression.

Rally racing enthusiasts have suddenly become spoiled for choice in terms of console games. The mud-and-jumps sport has had two dedicated titles released thus far in 2016 – Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo and DiRT Rally – while October 2015 saw the release of WRC 5, the official franchise for the World Rally Championship. We now have word from the game’s producers that the sequel will be available on all major platforms this fall.

Join us from 18:00 EDT / 23:00 BST / 00:00 CEST this evening as we air our report from the launch event of the latest instalment in the Gran Turismo Franchise.

Join us live tomorrow (Sunday 8th May) on YouTube from 16:30 EDT / 21:30 BST / 22:30 CEST as GTPlanet’s top drivers race with Lucas (2008 Nissan GT Academy Champion) on GT6, and help him prepare for next weekend’s round of the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup at Silverstone!

Of course Polyphony has been programming AI for the Gran Turismo series for almost 20 years and in recent iterations of the game you’ve been able to train and micromanage your own versions of the AI in a game mode called “B-Spec” – so players have taken to calling the driver “B-Spec Bob”. With two decades of experience creating AI that can deal with high-speed racing, Polyphony should be confident.

You’d be excused for calling the beginning of 2016 a rough start for most of the previous GT Academy grads. While veterans like Ordonez, Mardenborough, and Heitkotter all had their positions announced by Nissan in February – joined by recent grads like Matt Simmons – an alarming number of winners were notable for their absence. Gaetan Paletou and Wolfgang Reip were just two of the drivers that found themselves without a seat in the new year.

The world of eSports has seen exponential growth as of late, becoming the de facto standard in representing the fierce competition available in some of the most popular gaming franchises currently available. That environment now has to contend with the first virtual championship of the FIA Formula E — the Race Off Pro Series, and it’s coming to Forza Motorsport 6.

This event was originally scheduled for 20th February, but had to be postponed due to issues with the PlayStation Network.

Following on from the Nismo mention of the program last week, GT Academy held a press event yesterday in Egypt. Taking place at the Autovrooom track in Cairo (Facebook link if you have a particularly strong interest in the Sunny and/or Juke), few details were released, though GTPlanet member (and 2015 GTA North African champion) sems4arsenal was present. Much as the case was last year, expect some changes to the format…