Classic Ferrari wins Gran Turismo Award at 2021 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance

A spellbindingly pretty Ferrari 512 S Berlinetta from 1969 has won the Gran Turismo Award at the 2021 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance.

The 512 was a 5.0 V12 race car, with 25 examples made between 1969 and 1970, and was a direct rival to the Porsche 917 – a car that will be in Gran Turismo 7.

For the uninitiated, the event celebrates the world’s finest collector cars and was the 70th edition, after the 2020 event was cancelled due to the global pandemic. All vehicles compete for the honour of Best of Show – this year won by a 1938 Mercedes-Benz 540K Autobahnkurier – but there are also supplementary competitions, such as the Gran Turismo Award.

Game producer Kazunori Yamauchi is part of the Concours d’Elegance’s judging panel and personally awards the victor with not only a memento, but the chance for the vehicle to be in a Gran Turismo game.

Over the years, 13 cars have won the prestigious Gran Turismo Award, five of which have appeared in Gran Turismo games and of those five, all are in GT Sport. The last one to feature is the 2013 winner, an Aston Martin DB3S CN.1 ’53, which made its debut in the current GT game and is briefly in the Gran Turismo 7 trailer.

With the list being eight years behind at this point, and only new Toyota vehicles making it into GT Sport in recent times, it’s safe to assume that the Ferrari will not make it into the current title. But for Gran Turismo 7? Well, it’s possible, but we’d hesitate on it being there at launch due to the painstaking detail Polyphony Digital goes into recreating vehicles.

As for the remaining Pebble Beach winners, we’re very much looking forward to seeing if they make it into the next Sony-published racing game. We’ll take the AAR Eagle Indy Car ’66 that won in 2018, please.