Polyphony Digital will air a special exhibition race on its social media channels today, with the 2024 Race of Champions rounding out this year’s racing calendar.
It’s the second year that this one-off, season-ending race has taken place, following the first official staging in 2023. As the name might somewhat suggest, the event consists of a single race between several players who’ve scored titles in the Gran Turismo World Series over the years.
That includes the freshly minted 2024 champions, with Takuma Miyazono taking the Nations Cup win, Kanata Kawakami, Coque Lopez, and Harald Walsen for Team Lexus in the Manufacturers Cup, and Jose Serrano as Toyota Gazoo Racing GT Cup champion.
In fact the assembled dozen players have 35 titles between them, going right back to the first season in 2018. We’ll get to see five-time winner Miyazono face off with fellow grand slam champions Igor Fraga and Mikail Hizal, with Lopez the only driver to score championships in four successive seasons — from 2021 to 2024 — and both of the Olympic champions: Kylian Drumont and Valerio Gallo.
The race itself, held at Polyphony Digital’s offices the weekend before Christmas as part of the company’s annual year-end party, will be familiar to players who are taking part in the Daily Races this week. It’ll be a ten-lap blast around Tokyo Expressway East Clockwise in a selection of custom-tuned road cars on Racing Hard tires.
Each of the dozen drivers will race a different machine, and there’s a mixture of the expected and a few surprises. Defending ROC champion Gallo, for example, will be in his trusty Honda NSX Type R, while 2023 Manufacturers Cup champion Ryota Kokubun is back in the Mazda fold (as he was in 2024) in the RX-7 Spirit R. Miyazono has gone for the recently added Lamborghini Gallardo, while Serrano is in the sibling Audi R8 V10 — also making its debut.
Fraga, Lopez, Walsen, and Hizal will all steer a different generation of Nissan GT-R, from R32 to R35 in that order, while Drumont, Urra, and Yamanaka go Euro with the F40, AMG GT Black, and 991 GT3 RS respectively. That leaves Kawakami, who set a record for the longest gap between two titles this year, in the classic Mk4 Supra.
The stream begins at 1500 UTC today, Tuesday December 31, with both English and Japanese commentary options.
See more articles on Gran Turismo World Series and Race of Champions.
