The curtain may have only just fallen on the 2024 Gran Turismo World Series, but already we’re learning that the series will run again in 2025 and is promised to be the biggest ever event.
2024’s championship broke new ground repeatedly, with three of the four live events coming from brand-new venues — and two even from completely new countries. Even though the final itself took the drivers back to Theater Amsterdam, this was also a new location for the final having previously hosted the 2023 Showdown.
For its first two live events, the 2024 championship visited Montreal in Canada and Prague in Czechia. Neither city nor nation had ever hosted an event before. Tokyo was familiar ground for the third round, but even then the host venue was a brand-new multi-purpose tower block in the Kabukicho district.
However the online portion of the series, which selected the 12 drivers and 12 teams to attend these four events, did come under fire for its brevity. It consisted of just six races in each of the two championships — exceeded even by the seven-round Toyota Gazoo Racing GT Cup — and even then it included three dropped rounds.
A comment posted by the official Gran Turismo TV YouTube account at the end of the Nations Cup stream though confirmed that the 2025 event would be “bigger than ever” and include “exciting new and familiar stops”.
Hopefully that will mean a slightly lengthier online season and a return to per-event qualification as we’ve seen in previous years, as well as a larger field of finalists than the reduced head-count we saw in the 2024 Nations Cup.
As for the teased “stops” on the live event tour, we’re curious exactly where we might see the series visit in 2025. Thus far the GT World Series has visited four different continents and eleven countries across 21 events.
Austria, Japan, and Monaco have been the most-frequented, with three visits apiece — Austria’s Hangar-7 and Monaco’s Monte-Carlo Bay both hosting all of their nations’ events — while Germany, Netherlands, Spain, and the USA are all on two events.
Either way, the exclamation “we hope to see you there in person” could suggest more public events, with ticket sales open to all.
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