The most iconic cars from Gran Turismo games, past and present

PlayStation celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2024, and while Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo series might not have been there with it since the very start, the platform’s success owes a huge deal to Yamauchi-San’s studio.

There was nothing like it when the first game popped up in 1997. This was the real driving simulator, in an era when you were more likely to drive over a power-up than use the brake button. It featured licensed cars – absolutely loads of them – and it let you buy new parts to upgrade their performance.

Along with stellar handling and a unique weightines to vehicular control, that car ownership fantasy’s been at the heart of the GT series ever since. The cars, then, matter quite a bit.

Here’s the thing: the most iconic cars in the series for you are the ones that you bought. Whichever bargain starter car you took with you through the categories, upgrading it as far as you could. The prize car that you unlocked for winning your first endurance race. Those are the vehicles that rightly belong in your personal hall of fame.

But sadly we weren’t there to watch when you did those things. You didn’t invite us round. So we’ll have to go broader with our picks. Vehicles that exemplify what the series stands for, that you wouldn’t find elsewhere, or that appear in your mind like a Pavlovian reflex when you hear ‘Gran Turismo’. Among a cast of thousands, these are the true icons.

The original overpowered, game-breaking car. An engineering absurdity designed to win the world’s steepest hill climb race, it turns out the 1998 Escudo Pikes Peak and its 981bhp were also pretty handy against Mini Coopers and Mazda Demios round Apricot Hill. So much so that once you acquired it in Gran Turismo 2, where it debuted, the ‘game’ was basically over. From thereon it was just a matter of pressing X to win, and how we loved that about it.

The Escudo’s appeared in almost every GT release since, and was added to Gran Turismo 7 in update 1.17, where it fits into a rather more balanced order of vehicles.

It’s entirely possible that you never owned or raced this race-spec Skyline R33. It was, after all, preposterously expensive in its GT2 debut and has remained so in subsequent appearances. What we’d bet our bottom Credit on, though, is that you’ve spent a decent amount of time just staring at it in the showroom menu.

Initially it’s the livery that grabs you. Then the pricing. Then the imagined victories with it. Then the reality of how many endurance races it would take to afford one snapped you out of your stupor, and you got back to the grind. Its turbocharged 2.7-litre inline six could hit 178mph on the straights, but it’s the perfect balance and power delivery that sets this one apart and gives you the extra lap time.

Vision Gran Turismo is a great concept - challenge automotive manufacturers to build their dream cars if boring things like profitability and safety regs and emissions laws ceased to exist. Ironically, like many of the great concept cars it birthed, it was rather flawed – in the end, the vast majority of manufacturers ended up delivering extremely similar looking variations of the same basic design. In short, they all look like squashed GTbyCitroens.

All but one, that is. The raging bull of Bologna would be damned if it was going to introduce curves now after decades of those angular, spaceship-like lines that had come to define it. You’d have to be squinting pretty hard to make the Countach among the violent diagonals of this 2019 V12 concept which debuted in GT7, but while so many others succumbed to homogeneity, this Lamborghini looks like a Lamborghini. Side note: drives nicely, too.

As good as it is at simulating motorsport and curating hypercar collections, what Gran Turismo does better than anybody is JDMs. And since its career mode has always been structured in a rags-to-riches way that starts you out in affordable machinery, its vehicle rosters have always had to span priceless hypercars to sensible, economical compacts. Welcome to the stage, Daihatsu Midget II D-Type.

Part motor vehicle, part feudal era farming equipment, it’s equipped with a monstrous 0.7-litre inline three that might be capable of breaking the speed limit. On a slope. On a windy day. But that’s the other great joy of GT games: buying parts for them and turning an unassuming Japanese supermini into the ultimate sleeper.

Haters will say the Denso Supra should be here instead, but consider this: the Castrol Supra’s cooler.

In case there’s any confusion, this is the ‘96 model pictured, but the ‘97 Tom’s Castrol Supra also appeared in GT5 and GT6 on PlayStation 3, and it’s the latter model that’s been added to GT7. Let’s be truly honest, though: both variants are truly iconic, and among the first cars you think about when ‘Gran Turismo’ comes to mind.

Racing one of these in the original PS1 release felt magical. Race cars were few and far between on that game’s roster, and the poise that this thing conveyed, even through a dusty old PS1 controller without triggers or analogue sticks, was mighty.

Designed by Adrian Newey himself while Red Bull’s F1 programme was entering its four-year streak of driver and constructors’ championships, the X2010 had seemingly limitless downforce and a stopping distance roughly the thickness of a paperback novella.

It’s such a high performance vehicle, in fact, that it’s quite hard to drive at first. Not because it’s unpredictable or lacks traction, but because there’s simply too much speed and grip to know what to do with. Its visual appeal is – well, let’s describe it as subjective, shall we? On one hand it perfectly captures the halfway point between an F1 car’s silhouette and closed-wheel, closed-cockpit road racing. On the other, it looks a bit like it fell off a space shuttle during launch. Either way, it was game-breakingly fast in Gran Turismo 5.

If you’re feeling like there are quite a few Japanese race cars from the late ‘90s to early 00’s on this list, all we can say is this: welcome to Gran Turismo.

No other racing game series at the time was replicating the vehicles of the Japanese Grand Touring Car Championship, so for many doe-eyed gamers, the GT series was their first look at such revered machinery. Honda won the 2000 JGTC championship with this Mugen NSX, and Polyphony marked the accomplishment by giving it a starring role in GT3’s opening cinematic, and as one of the most aspirational endgame cars that players would grind for many hours for a chance to own.