“Gran Turismo Sport,” the blockbuster hit for PlayStation4 and seventh in the series, is partnering with Toyota and the new Supra sports car to create an FIA-sanctioned e-championship that will run from April to August of this year. What does that mean for you? A few things.

One, the contest is open to all ages and will start online. If you’re interested, get all your updates in order and wait for April to arrive. There are 13 rounds and the final will be held live at the Tokyo Motor Show in October, which coincides with the final GT Sport World Tour event. It’ll be the first one-make racing series in the game’s history. You want to be the fastest virtual Supra driver in the world? Here’s your chance.

More importantly, Tetsuya Tada, the chief engineer at Toyota Gazoo Racing, announced at a live trackside event that the company wants “GT Sport” players “to communicate to us – give us feeback – on what they feel are the good parts and the not so good parts of driving the car. Your comments are extremely important to us as we prepare for the improvement for the following year, Supra GT Cup drivers around the world will take part in development and a member of our team.”

A non-paid member, we’d like to add.

In the trackside talk video, “Gran Turismo” series creator Kazunori Yamauchi says that since Toyota was one of the first to sign on as a manufacturer in the early games, it feels a bit like history repeating itself.

This should be no surprise to anyone who’s played these games and watched them progress to the point of both photorealism and engineering realism. If a car is twitchy in real life, it’ll be twitchy in the game. The real bumps on the Nurburgring are faithfully recreated on the virtual track. And remember, this is the game that lets you tune every minute bit of the car until you (or I) completely ruin it.

We made Kazunori our Car Culture Man of the Year precisely because he’s been keeping the car flame alive in today’s curated content world. That Toyota would agree to take our development thoughts on the car is just the next step. If you join, look for my handle, StarChief. I’ll be wallowing around the 40,000th place or so.

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