Live events return in the Gran Turismo World Series this weekend, with the first round of the 2025 championship breaking new ground once again as the series visits London.
It’s perhaps a surprise that the World Series (and its World Tour predecessor) has never visited the United Kingdom, given Gran Turismo’s popularity in the nation, the number of British finalists at the old GT Academy — and Silverstone hosting the majority of those events — and even the launch of GT Sport which took place across the city.
Nonetheless, London will be making its GTWS bow in the eighth season of the competition as one of four entirely new venues this year, which will also see the World Final vacate Europe for the first time and head to one of Polyphony Digital’s home cities: Fukuoka.
Along with the same four-round format as 2024, the 2025 season will be pretty familiar stuff. Once again we’ll see a 12-driver Nations Cup across all four events — nine from online qualifying, and the top three from 2024 — and each round of the Manufacturers Cup will have a different representative from each of the three regions at the three preliminary rounds before they unite for the final.
While brief once again, the online qualification process was action-packed and even found time to include a cheating scandal. Once the dust had all settled though, we had a mostly familiar line-up in the Nations Cup with just one driver making a debut, and a fairly regular look to the Manufacturers Cup too.
It’s probably the most globally famous venue for a GTWS event to date, as the former BBC Television Centre will be hosting the racing. This was the site of much of BBC’s global output for over 50 years, though the corporation moved back to its former Broadcasting House location in Westminster over a decade back.
BBC Studioworks, a commercial arm of the BBC which produces shows for multiple broadcasters, now runs the site, and operates three studios that include the UHD-capable TC1 — ideal for 4K streams of the GT World Series — which incorporates theater-style seating for at least 550 people in a 10,800 square-foot area. That’s big enough to have some cars on stage to be revealed for future updates, and we cross our fingers at that one.
Last we heard, there were tickets still available and it should be noted that these differ from previous events in being a single, full-event pass. Priced at £30 ($40/€35), or £20 for U18s ($27/€24), this general admission ticket lets you view the whole thing from the doors opening at 3.15pm until the 9.30pm finish. If you’ve not yet decided whether to attend, there ought to be plenty of GTPlanet members in attendance.
The bonus events keyed to the evening’s activities return for 2025, and if you’ve been taking part over the last couple of seasons you should probably be aware of how they work by now.
You can earn two free cars for tuning into the streams through a special portal within Gran Turismo 7 itself. One is a Gr.3 car, which will be the vehicle of the brand that wins the Manufacturers Cup race on the day, while the other is an Aston Martin in a special Nations Cup livery appropriate to the winning driver.
To claim these you’ll need to click on the “Watch Stream (Entry Available)” button on each stream between the time the live broadcast starts (1440 UTC and 1740 UTC respectively) and 0900 UTC on Monday June 23. The vehicles will be distributed automatically after the next GT7 update, which we’re expecting to be on Thursday June 26 — though this isn’t yet confirmed.
Additionally you can score up to 2,000,000cr for your powers of prediction. You can select one of the 12 entries in each event, again through a special in-game portal, that you think will win its final race, and there’s a million credits for each one you get correct.
As it’s the first round of the year, form is difficult to judge — especially in Manufacturers Cup which uses a custom Balance of Performance (BOP) — but we’d never bet against Takuma Miyazono in the Red Bull X2019s used for the final race. He’ll also be representing Subaru in London, which is set to be the Asia-Oceania region round, but he’ll have his work cut out for him against fellow champions Ryota Kokubun in the Mazda and Kanata Kawakami in the Lexus. Even so, we’d be looking at Kenta Morimoto’s Toyota.
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