Kazunori Yamauchi has revealed in a presentation in New York that the new brand partner for the GT Sport FIA-Certified Online Championships is Michelin.
The French tire giant follows the FIA itself, TAG Heuer, and Toyota in becoming official partners for the flagship esports tournament. It also becomes the technical partner of tire technology for GT Sport.
At its most basic level, players can expect an increased presence of the Michelin brand in GT Sport. That will include prominent branding on trackside signs, and the Michelin logo within vehicle settings. There’ll also be a Michelin section within Brand Central, accompanying the other partner brands. However the partnership has considerably more depth than this superficial change.
Speaking at the partnership presentation, Gran Turismo series producer Kazunori Yamauchi explained:
“We have been pursuing the perfection of car physics for in our simulation for 25 years now. We’ve always found that the most mysterious part of that is the tires. In the 25 years we’ve been developing the game we’d always imagined what are the physical properties of a tire, and basically worked off our imagination to determine how a tire should react within the physics model.
“Michelin has a massive amount of technology relevant to tires and implementing that knowledge into the physics of Gran Turismo is going to allow us to have a more realistic simulation in the game as well as providing improved facets of strategy for the players in the FIA Championships. Now that we have this partnership with Michelin, and their long history and technology behind them, it really allows us to create something that is going to be real, closer to the reality of how a tire should behave.”
Scott Clark, executive vice-president of the Americas region for Michelin, commented:
“When you take the amount of data we’ve collected over the years from different circuits, different vehicles, different tire compounds and marry that withsome of our simulation capabilities, it’ll bring a whole new dimension of strategy and ultimately improve the performance and realism of the game. That’s really what we’re both trying to do here and it’s really an exciting new digital adventure.”
The Michelin partnership will start to appear in GT Sport with game updates in October.
See more articles on FIA Online Championship and Michelin.
