Along with some upcoming changes to the 2025 Gran Turismo World Series, Polyphony Digital has announced a short Nations Cup Exhibition Season will get underway this month.
It’s another short, four-race calendar, similar to recent Exhibition Seasons, but there’s a couple of alterations compared to what we’ve seen across 2024, most notably in terms of timings.
The race line-up is actually relatively familiar: all four events have been previously used, but not on the current physics model. It’s tilted more towards higher performance cars, and the full schedule is as follows:
GT World Series 2025 Exhibition Season 1 – Nations Cup
- Round 1 – January 22 – Sardegna Road Track A/Gr.2 – 18/14 laps
- Round 2 – January 25 – Red Bull Ring/Gr.3 – 28/14 laps
- Round 3 – January 29 – Road Atlanta/Suzuki Cappuccino – 10 laps
- Round 4 – February 2 – Grand Valley Highway-1/X2019 – 27 laps
What should jump out here is the days of the events. While we’ve got used to Saturdays for World Series races, this Exhibition Season is reverting to the alternating Wednesday/Saturday format from previous years. That should make the season fly by even more rapidly…
No matter what day the race, the timings are the same. It has to be said that this is a little up in the air right now as the times on most of the official pages are listed as Northern Hemisphere summer time (when it is clearly not summer!), but as usual the lower leagues will get ten entry slots spread across the day and GT1 has three slots from early afternoon to evening.
The other major difference between GT1 and GT2/GT3 leagues comes by way of standard “heavy damage” in the higher league — requiring time in the pits to repair, if desired — while the self-healing “light damage” is set in the other series. GT1 also has longer races in two of the four events, but there’s no difference in race fuel consumption, tire wear, pit stop requirements, or mandatory tires.
As usual, while you can enter as many slots as you wish for each round, only the last race you enter counts towards your score — even if you disconnect and score zero. Unusually, this season will count your best three round scores towards your points total, so there’s only one dropped round this time out.
The Gran Turismo World Series is a more formal championship than the Daily Races, featuring longer races and a dedicated points system.
Whenever you first enter the series you’ll be assigned into a “League” that matches your current Driver Rating (DR) rank. Players with a DR of A or A+ go into GT1 League, those with a DR of B will head into the GT2 League, and drivers at C and lower slot into GT3 League. Your League will not change during the season, regardless of whether your DR rank does.
In each race you’ll be awarded points that depend on your finishing position and the average Driver Rating score of the players in that lobby. As the Driver Rating cap is changing ahead of the 2025 season, we can’t yet say what the top lobbies will score but previously we’ve seen GT1 League racers scoring almost 500 points for a win with GT3 League wins potentially being worth low two-digits and even possible single digits.
Taking part in the GTWS is a good opportunity to get a bit of a credit and Driver Rating boost. The latest change for 2025 will see more DR points on offer for these more serious events — although you could risk losing more too as it’s a zero-sum exchange — and you’ll receive bonus credits according to your overall League ranking within your primary and secondary geographical areas, country, and region.
For GT1 players that’s worth up to 9m credits this time round, while GT2/3 players can score a maximum of 4.5m. With it being a best-three-of-four series this time round, you’ll probably need some dedication to get big money, but even taking part in a couple of GT3 races should be worth around 1.1m.
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