14 DAY TRIAL // The team behind the GT Academy initiative and Nissan are announcing that Wolfgang Reip and Florian Strauss, who have become pilots after playing a lot of video games, and Katsumasa Chiyo have managed to win the Bathurst 12 Hour race using a Nissan GT-R.
The car was initially affected by a crash during qualifications, which prompted repair work right before the start of the race.
Wolfgang Reip and Florian Strauss have both been piloting for a limited time, after cutting their teeth on the GT Academy program, which takes gamers who perform well in Gran Turismo and trains them to become professionals.
Florian Strauss is quoted as saying after the Bathurst 12 Hour victory, “I am very lucky that we have won, no one can say what would you have achieved with Alex, we couldn’t have achieved a better result. The team did an amazing job all weekend, Chiyo put the car in first place, the team put all the effort in to get the car ready in the morning.”
The Bathurst win is the first for the Nissan GT-R after a series of disappointments that started in 1992.
Gran Turismo is expected to deliver a PlayStation 4 installment soon
The series has not yet delivered a title for the new Sony home console, but the leader of the Polyphony Digital team, Kazunori Yamauchi, has said that an official reveal will be made in 2015 and the actual launch might take place in 2016.
He also says that the game will benefit from the computing power of the PlayStation 4 and from the fact that the new platform is much easier to develop for than the PS3.
Rumors are talking about a title which aims to simulate all the major racing tracks in the world and will include hundreds of cars as part of its initial release.
The development team at Polyphony Digital is known for its attention to detail, but that also results in longer than usual development schedules and fans of Gran Turismo will be keen for the Prologue scenario not to repeat itself.
In the meantime, the GT Academy program, which is created in partnership with Nissan, seems poised to continue and fans of the franchise will get more news about results in the coming weeks and months.
