Win a real Gran Turismo legend

The MSVT Racing Championship are looking to do things a bit differently. The incentive for winning its headlining Turismo X racing series has caught the imagination of the Gran Turismo generation. In the 25^th anniversary year for Gran Turismo, MSVT will be awarding the winner of the Turismo X championship a 2000 Mazda Demio.

For those who are a little confused, let us explain why this has every millennial racing fan excited. The Mazda Demio doesn’t mean much to the majority of the population, but one car that a Venn diagram loops millennial racing fans and ‘soccer moms’ together is the Demio. In Gran Turismo and Gran Turismo 2 the Demio was one of the very early cars available to purchase with your meager opening credits. Unlike a lot of modern racing games, the early Gran Turismo series made you work hard before you were rewarded with R34 V-Specs and RUF CTR2s. You’d need to put in several hours of pushing a kei car to its absolute limit before you could get behind the wheel of anything quick enough to pull the skin off a rice pudding. When you’d finally saved up your 13,430 credits, the Mazda Demio was a great option to take to the circuit. It may not have had all the pace in the world, but it could handle well enough and was the perfect carriage to take you to the next level.

As you can tell, then, the Mazda Demio prize on offer for winning the Turismo X championship represents more than its monetary value. The winner will have a chance to relive their youth and most likely realise that it really is as slow as it felt in the games.

If you are a fan of grassroots racing, you may know this series by its former name, the MSVT SuperCup. The change in name to Turismo X is part of a major winter rebrand of the series. There’s a new sprint race format as well as the addition of a super pole qualifying shootout. Anyone who’s seen club racing at this level will know how entertaining it can be to watch. They’re held all around the UK including circuits such as Silverstone, Anglesey, Snetterton, Oulton Park, Donnington Park and Brands Hatch.

We may start a campaign to make classic cars the prize for all racing series. Who knows, maybe Lewis Hamilton would have held off Max Verstappen at the end of last year’s Formula 1 championship if he’d have had the incentive of winning a 1997 Nissan Skyline R33 NISMO 400R? We’ll never know.