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If you have been following Gran Turismo 7’s updates this year, you may have noticed something strange. Polyphony Digital suddenly seems to be enamored with crossovers. It’s a somewhat depressing trend; over the last six months, the game has received the prior-gen Honda CR-V, Peugeot 2008, Mazda CX-30, and Toyota C-HR. As July winds to a close, it looks like the Nissan Qashqai is about to join their ranks. I can stomach it, though, because on the other end of the spectrum, we’re also getting the baddest R34 Skyline GT-R of them all, in the Nismo Z-Tune.
GT7’s Update 1.61 will go live in the early hours of Thursday morning, and it’ll bring those two additions, as well as the Honda N-One RS: a modern kei car with a six-speed manual and turbocharged three-cylinder making the maximum 63 horsepower that Japan allows for vehicles in that class. The little Honda feels like one of those cars you’d expect to discover and fall in love with in a Gran Turismo game.
The Qashqai, on the other hand, is a cynical reminder that the automotive landscape that the series reflects today is quite different from the one it materialized in during the late ’90s. I understand that argument that today’s crossovers are the compact commuters of yesteryear, but they’re not as fun to drive or tune, with their tall centers of gravity and powertrains engineered for efficiency at the cost of all else. The CR-V that joined the game this past spring had a CVT, for example, which locks it out of any meaningful upgrades. The Nissan is expected to behave similarly, as it’s a hybrid. At least in GT’s early days, you could take your starter used Civic and upgrade it until it was nipping at the heels of Lancer Evos and Supras, but that just isn’t possible with these small SUVs.
So that leaves us with the Nismo Z-Tune, which isn’t a terrible consolation prize at all. This is the ultimate R34 GT-R, commemorating the 20th anniversary of Nissan’s performance arm back in 2004. Here, Nismo bored and stroked the twin-turbo RB26 to produce a staggering 500 hp and 398 lb-ft of torque, and added a titanium exhaust, Sachs bolt-on dampers, and bespoke Brembo brakes, just to name a few performance-minded goodies.
Only 20 Z-Tunes were built, both to represent the anniversary and because, by 2004, the R34 GT-R was already out of production. Gran Turismo has always been known for representing the Skyline GT-R lineage perhaps a little too well, but the Z-Tune has somehow never appeared in the franchise before, so this is a big moment.
Elsewhere, you can expect the usual drip feed of races, a new track for the Sophy AI to compete on (High-Speed Ring), and new Scapes locales to snap photos. I say it every time I cover one of these updates, but you’ve got to wonder how many more of these Polyphony has stashed before it packs up GT7 and moves right onto GT8. Then again, perhaps that won’t land until the PlayStation 6 does.
