My Gran Turismo 7 Car Collection: The Definitive Review
No, it doesn’t have 24 Skylines
After writing with great fondness about my opening hours with Gran Turismo 7, it seems entirely fitting (to me) that I should write about what are, in some ways, my closing hours. I’ve happily graduated from the run of sequentially-set menu challenges and now face the big, grown-up problem of having to decide for myself what to do. Gran Turismo 7 chose a particularly fitting send-off for that graduation, pitting me against thoroughly decent GT3-class track bastards across some of the best circuits in the game, which I naturally chose to cheat my through with a despicably de-tuned Toyota TS030 - a Le Mans prototype with ludicrous capabilities. The beauty, of course, being that while you can reduce the Toyota’s 900+ PP rating down to the 800 demanded by the event - by drastically reducing engine power and increasing rear spoiler drag - you still get all the benefits of its supernaturally effective top-tier aero. This means that while it tops out at a paltry 170 MPH and takes a lot longer to get there, it still has the insane suction powers to keep a large proportion of that speed through corners where the opposition is braking and changing down. Likewise, the TS030’s brakes are pinnacle spec. Obviously this gives a colossal advantage in being able to out-brake everyone by a stupendous margin but it turns the slower corners of opening laps into a kind of Turismo Danmaku, with me having to thread a very rapid prototype through ever-shifting fields of slowcoaches. The real upshot of taking the piss to this degree? Huge amounts of fun. It turned what could be a earnestly dour and serious simulation of GT3 racing into a reflex-testing hootfest.
The Toyota TS030 is a car for which I have immense personal affection, having seen it battle against similarly-specced Audis and Porsches at Silverstone and Le Mans. Le Mans being particularly brutal as the splendid blue-and-white Denso-batteried prototype had all the makings of Toyota’s first Le Mans winner until an FIA sensor failed and effectively killed the car’s howling naturally-aspirated V8. Yes, while we were actually there, ten years ago. Audi went on to win that year, which was its last before Porsche took the victory in 2015. In my namedrops for this week, I’ll always have fond memories of standing at Tetre Rouge at 5am with Mike Channell, Oli Welsh and Martin Robinson, watching the now grime-stained race machinery hurtle onto the same Mulsanne straight we’d be driving along just 12 hours later1. It’s that sense of place and of raw endurance in extreme machinery that gives Le Mans its extraordinary cachet. We were standing at a particular location, at a particular time of day, that thousands had done over the 90-odd years preceding our visit. In a sense, the incredibly modern cars we saw powering onto that straight were upholding that same tradition and by that virtue, there’s a kind of unification between spectator and competitor. There’s the feeling of some shared experience unique to Le Mans. For the bleary-eyed stalwarts like me and the drivers and team members, we’d all made it through the night together, so we could now feel the warm June sun rising over the circuit. The act of spectating takes on a perverse sense of duty in the small hours, a somewhat vainglorious force of moral purpose descends as the audience dwindles. Amidst the sleep deprivation and ear fatigue is an urge to stay awake and keep watching, which has become a vital role in the race’s totality - what is the point of a race without spectators?2 Of course, only the truly hardcore are still trackside at 4:00am, having put in 13 hours of solid watching. In 2014, I was haunted by the loss of the leading Toyota, but I had other teams to follow. Such is the beauty of multi-class racing. Toyota did claim a Le Mans victory eventually, but more by continuing to fund a top-level prototype team (when others didn’t) than by outright defeating equal opposition. In the romance of Le Mans, taking part is often as tricky a battle as finishing the race - that’s right, just finishing is its own kind of victory. Gran Turismo has offered up its own realtime 24 hours of Le Mans across several iterations3, but Gran Turismo 7 doesn’t offer it as a formal event. But as I mentioned in my initial review, GT7 seems so much more oriented around car ownership and collection than it does around outright competition for its own sake, even if its online multiplayer Sport mode is the formal endgame.
When you progress through the mandated Menu challenges, finishing the initial set builds a wonderfully varied car collection and in some respects, this is the game’s greatest achievement. It leaves you with a suite of automobiles to take on nearly every challenge that awaits in the next tier of free-choice menus, but reaching the menu milestone also allows something wonderful. You can sell everything for pretty decent money. You see, the mandated collection is Kazunori’s taste, not yours. But once you’ve proved your mettle to him, everything can go and you can shape your collection to suit your whims. This is fabulous as even award and prize cars can be sold. There’s none of Forza Horizon’s zero-value bauble culture here. But yet, it feels as though Kazunori hasn’t gone quite far enough. The concept of an ownership sim hasn’t been fully explored.
Gran Turismo 7 is particularly harsh with its idea of consumerism. In forcing analogy with real-world high-end car ownership, it employs an invitation system to allow the purchase of real prestige machinery. This is alongside deliberately limited (both in terms of catalogue and time for availability) second-hand purchases, meaning it’s not possible to simply buy whatever you want if you pump enough real money into the game’s virtual currency. I can see a real benefit in this - I worked really hard and resisted a lot of temptation to save up the clean 1,000,000 credits for my beloved TS030, so my sense of deserved ownership is that much more tangible. I now have an absolutely harrowing choice to make with the 3,000,000 I’ve accrued from that final series and selling off the inventory I didn’t want. At the time of writing, the Hagerty legends dealership has no less than three Le Mans legends up for sale4, alongside the F40 and 288 GTO halo Ferraris. If I had another seven million, there’s also the Mclaren MP4/4 F1 car. And this is without considering the Brand Central offerings where other, 21st Century Le Mans machinery awaits (alongside a dizzying array of other cars I want to buy). So the task is clear - keep racing, grind out the cash!
Unfortunately, beyond the pure joys of driving really fast and getting more cars, there isn’t that great an incentive to grind. The Menu challenge run and its formal finale capped off what initially felt quite open-ended and I can’t deny a certain fatigue with the whole affair. When Control came back to Game Pass, I quickly set the download going, having been tipped off about its sense of brutalist grandeur by Alex Wiltshire’s episode of The Back Page. Seems my unconscious was very happy to make the leap into Remedy’s 2019 odyssey of bonkers powers, supernatural menaces and a quasi-X-Files exploration of paranoid style conspiracism. But then, I am a sucker for the allure of classified, redacted documents in a melange of Mulder-meets-Cooper romanticism, set in a mythic Black Lodge variant of corporate headquarters. But for Turismo, I think it’ll still thread its way between the gaps. It sits so well in the troughs of interest in other games, perpetually available, with so many ownership goals to fulfil. It says something that I’m still checking the online GT7 dealership listings to see what’s around. But again I’m haunted by a sense that Gran Turismo 7 could offer something more. Perhaps it lies in allowing the player to present what they’ve earned somehow. To construct a homescreen showing your three favourite purchases, or as I mentioned in my first piece, some in-universe spectator mode that lets you arrive in a car of your choice to sit at some preferred vantage point with kindred spirits, watching the talented fly past as you discuss colour chips or roadmaps for future purchases5. Maybe if Gran Turismo took this more universalist view to a logical extreme, I could recreate my 2014 pilgrimage to Tetre Rouge, to stand once again at 4am to watch the dawn breaking behind those iconic trees. Aside from the signature scent of a well-rubbered race track full of hydrocarbon exhaust, the only thing missing would be the warmth of the sun.
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Le Mans uses parts of the public roads for its iconic Mulsanne straight, which is rapidly returned to public use after the race ends. Chances are you'll end up driving on it when exiting a campsite.
I think I mentioned in some previous piece about the time I watched the entire 24 hours of Le Mans in 2013. I battled the small hours with the PSP version of Gran Turismo and successfully made it to the 3pm end. Thereafter I had an extremely hallucinogenic journey for Sunday dinner and feeling the urge to push for a 9pm retirement, promptly fell into a profound, hibernatory sleep at 8.
Yes, a pretend race that takes 24 real hours to complete. Gran Turismo 4 may have been the first to offer this, but Sim Racing is now so wonderfully established that there’s an annual virtual Le Mans to compliment the real one. This came about when the actual race was delayed during the COVID pandemic, so the sim version was run on the traditional June date.
Jaguar XJR-9 LM, Mazda 787B and Sauber-Mercedes C9. All of which I owned in Gran Turismo 5 and DEARLY MISS HAVING.
Or, you know, just chat! I’d love to use a virtual Le Mans or Nurburgring as a hangout spot for simple chinwagging.