My, how time flies. Gran Turismo 7 turned four years old last week. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might assume support has long since ended by now, and Polyphony Digital is onto the next thing. But GT7 is still seeing updates, and after a comprehensive one at the end of last year, this Thursday will bring three more cars to the game.
OK, we’ll acknowledge the Renault Captur and ask it to kindly move aside so we can focus on the two other inclusions here: a restomodded 1969 Chevy Camaro and a 1991 ɛ̃fini Mazda RX-7. The Camaro is formally referred to as a “race mod,” which calls to mind the racing modification feature from prior GT titles, where you could take a stock car, spend about $80,000 on it after having fully reduced its weight, and end up with a bona fide competition machine, complete with a special body kit and livery.
This Camaro is a little different, though. It’s clearly not just a race mod but a restomod, with that modern carbon-fiber splitter and prominent rear diffuser. This transformation has swept into the Camaro as well, adding a rally-style handbrake, digital dash, and a slate of race-ready controls just beside the steering wheel. And this isn’t a SEMA creation that Polyphony Digital has rendered in Gran Turismo; it’s fully their own manifestation, not unlike those extra cars included with December’s Power Pack DLC.
It’s not for everyone, which is why the other coupe in this update—the ɛ̃fini RX-7—might be more appealing to you. Yes, GT7 already has an RX-7, but that’s a final-edition Spirit R version from 2002—it’s peak FD. (Unless you account for stuff like the Mazdaspeed A-Spec.) This 1991 model dates back to the car’s very first year of sale, and it makes 252 horsepower and 217 lb-ft of torque.
As for the ɛ̃fini badge, hardcore fans know that it was one of Mazda’s sub-brands in Japan, which only lasted a short time. The RX-7 was sold under the more luxurious ɛ̃fini marque for about its first four years on sale. By the time the Series 8 revision of the sports car arrived in 1998, the retail experiment was winding down, and so the RX-7 was exclusively a Mazda in its home market from then on.
Does any of this matter to how the car actually behaves? No, but I am exactly the kind of nerd that loves it when Gran Turismo includes multiple iterations of the same car, especially for a car that ran for as long as the FD RX-7 did, and especially for one sold under a weird, here-and-gone brand with a name nobody knew how to pronounce. Plus, Polyphony’s car models are the best in the industry, so it almost feels like a step toward preserving this era of the RX-7, at least digitally.
This is about when I usually start to opine about where GT7’s really going from here, and that there’s no way we can expect updates like this to continue for much longer. Then again, it seems likely that we won’t know about a GT8 until we know about a PS6. Some say Sony’s next console has been delayed due to AI’s whole stranglehold on memory and storage; others say production is on track for next year. Personally, it feels like I just got my PS5 two years ago, so I’m not ready to drop many hundreds on a new PlayStation; keep them updates coming.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
