If you’ve been keeping yourself in the loop with the latest Gran Turismo 7 news, you might have noticed one glaring absence from the most recent update to the car list. While almost every car from GT Sport is now confirmed to be on GT7’s roster of vehicles, one appears to have been removed: the Fittipaldi EF7 Vision Gran Turismo.
The EF7 was something of a surprise when teased ahead of the Geneva Motor Show in 2017. Designed by Pininfarina, with engineering input from Mercedes offshoot HWA AG, it was a brand new car from a brand new company — named for and spearheaded by legendary Brazilian double F1 world-champion Emerson Fittipaldi.
While it was a Vision Gran Turismo in name, Fittipaldi Motors announced plans to build a production model of the track-day car almost unchanged. In total, 39 cars were planned — one for each of Fittipaldi’s F1 (including non-championship) and IndyCar victories — with personal driver tuition from Fittipaldi himself.
Although it might not have been the most-used car in the game, thanks in part to being in the eclectic “Gr.X” holding pattern for cars that didn’t fit in anywhere else, the EF7 did star in one of the most memorable Gran Turismo World Tour events to date, in New York in 2019.
However, the car now seems to be on the cutting room floor. Rather than simply not being revealed yet, it appears to be totally absent.
The most recent State of Play broadcast showed that the brand no longer appears in the United States section of Brand Central, which has been updated to include manufacturers like Eckert’s Rod & Customs and Chris Holstrom Concepts, split out from the Gran Turismo brand umbrella.
In addition, the EF7 is conspicuously absent from the “400 cars” matrix shown early in the video. This 20×20 grid of cars doesn’t show all of the vehicles in the game, but it is alphabetically sorted by what appears to be each car’s filename: from “4C” to “WRX”. The EF7 doesn’t appear anywhere that it reasonably could on the chart.
Lastly, and most curious of all, the car seems to have been edited out of an in-game screenshot. A full-resolution image shows four Vision GT cars lined up in a Scapes shot, but another version which appears in a picture frame within GT Cafe appears to have the bright yellow EF7 lurking in the distance.
If indeed the Fittipaldi EF7 has been removed from Gran Turismo 7’s car list, it raises several questions. As a Vision GT car it’s among the least likely machines to vanish; we don’t know how long any agreement between car manufacturers and Sony/Polyphony Digital lasts, but one precedent could be the Citroen GT by Citroen which remained exclusive to Gran Turismo for a decade. The EF7 has only been in Gran Turismo since October 2017 and Gran Turismo Sport.
This could of course be a situation similar to the one which saw the DeltaWing — technically the joint property of Panoz, All American Racers, Highcroft, and Michelin but campaigned originally as a Nissan — removed from Gran Turismo 6 shortly before launch, only to be restored soon after. However Fittipaldi Motors LLC, of Miami, Florida, appears to have become inactive in 2019 and the company website now cannot be reached.
We’ve reached out to primary project designer Pininfarina for any clarification on this little mystery.
See more articles on Emerson Fittipaldi and Vision Gran Turismo.
