Six championship points have been allocated to Subaru for a win at the first Gran Turismo World Series Manufacturers Cup round of the season.
The Gran Turismo 7 competition that will see three 12-car manufacturers fight for a team’s championship across the year had an all-Japanese driver lineup for the race held inside BBC Studioworks.
In a room usually home to the Graham Norton Show, a sold-out crowd would witness a duel between BMW’s Seiya Suzuki and two-time Manufacturers Cup champion Takuma Miyazono driving for Subaru.
The two adversaries would line up on the front row, the M6 just edging the BRZ in qualifying. They also both opted for the soft compound tyre to start, while the rest of the field selected mediums.
This allowed Suzuki and Miyazono to gap the rest of the grid, with the Subaru driver sitting patiently in the tow of the BMW for the majority of the 20-lap race.
Having explained post-race that he is known for a last-lap overtake, Miyazono instead pounced into the hairpin on Lap 18. However, Suzuki would strike back almost immediately, using the BMW’s superior straightline speed.
That then set up a final lap shootout, with the leader covering the inside line at Turn 3 and then again at the pivotal hairpin – only to run deep and leave just enough space for a Subaru to slide through to win.
“This time around, I actually really didn’t think I had the pace, but in qualifying I did a lot better than I thought to place second,” said Miyazono.,
“I practice a lot with Suzuki, and he was really fast in all the practice we went through, so my thought was to follow his strategy and then I maybe have a chance at the very end.
“That actually worked, but I think it was because Suzuki was really fast that I was able to keep up with him.”
Outside of the top two, the rest of the medium-starting drivers took chunks out of each other, delaying their races and meaning that when they did eventually switch to softs, Suzuki and Miyazono were too far ahead.
Something had to give, and in this instance, it was the Porsche of Shota Sato, punted into the wall following contact by Kanata Kawakami in the Lexus. Ryota Kokubun eventually secured third in the rotary-powered Mazda.
Gran Turismo World Series 2025, Manufacturers Cup, Round 1 London, results
- Subaru – Takuma Miyazono – 6 points
- BMW – Seiya Suzuki – 5 points
- Mazda – Ryota Kokubun – 4 points
- Toyota – Kenta Morimoto – 3 points
- Nissan – Hiroshi Okumoto – 2 points
- McLaren – Tomoki Kamada – 1 point
- Ferrari – Jun Hashima
- Lamborghini – Yusuke Goto
- Honda – Ryosuke Tsujimura
- Lexus – Kanata Kawakami
- Mercedes-AMG – Kojiro Sasaki
- Porsche – Shota Sato
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