Watch A Real-Life Gran Turismo Race Around Tsukuba

One of the best things about reaching the upper echelons of the classic Gran Turismo games was the way you’d end up with races that would never happen in real life. You’d get ’90s DTM cars lining up against Group C endurance racers, and massively hopped-up Skylines and Evos racing their full-on JGTC counterparts.

What if we told you races like this did happen in real life, though? If you’re not familiar with the Japanese magazine and video series Best Motoring, then you really should be. A car culture force in the 1990s and 2000s, the highlights of its output were undoubtedly the races it held around the tight and twisty Tsukuba Circuit.

Watching these in a modern context, their influence on the Gran Turismo series is clear to see. They’d get together a host of cars, be they completely stock, tuned, or full-on racing cars, and pitch them against one another over a few laps. You’d get match-ups reminiscent of everything from the Sunday Cup to Like The Wind.

Anyway, this particular one caught our eye when it popped up on the excellent Instagram page Japanifornia this week. It’s the 2001 edition of Best Motoring’s Champion’s Battle, a yearly race where it’d pull together a selection of tuners and race cars from various categories and put them up against one another for a bit of fun.

This particular instance featured a pair of production-based racers from the Super Taikyu series, a Mitsubishi Evo VI and R34 Nissan Skyline GT-R. There’s then another R34 in the shape of the legendary tuned version from Japanese performance house Mine’s.

Next up are two JGTC racers – a 993 Porsche 911 from the second-tier GT300 class, and a full-fat GT500 Honda NSX. We then have a Ferrari F40 LM, the racing version of the iconic ’80s supercar and, just to show the rest of the pack what a fast car really looks like, a Formula Nippon racer. Today known as Super Formula, this Japanese open-wheel series has long been one of the very fastest sub-F1 racing series on the planet.

We won’t spoil the result, mainly because it should be pretty obvious what wins, but also because it’s really worth a watch yourself. Throw in a fantastically excitable announcer, and you’re all set up for a very diverse and surprisingly closely-matched race. Well, apart from one of the cars, obviously.

F40 LM image: Neil, CC BY 2.0