No, Steve Alvarez Brown, The GT7 Car list Isn't a "Total Mess"

In the last few days, I had been already at work for the first proper article for Powerhouse Takahashi. It was talking about one of the three cars that have been added with the deployment of Update 1.61 to Gran Turismo 7. However, the inevitable has happened that I did see coming but underestimated just how absurd it really was going to be. The prior article I was working on is focused on the NISMO R34 GT-R Z-Tune, but instead we're talking about the Nissan Qashqai Tekna e-Power. It is a shame the Honda N-One RS is taking the back burner of the three, but here we are.

The Qashqai continues a steady run in the recent updates of Gran Turismo 7 of adding a crossover, a sport utility vehicle, or a commercial vehicle of some kind to the roster. Most recently before the Qasqhai was the addition of a Peugeot 2008, with a Mazda CX-30, a Honda CR-V and a Suzuki Carry kei truck arriving not that long ago in their own right. The first vehicle in this body style to arrive in a Gran Turismo game was the Subaru Forester S/tb in Gran Turismo 2, with other SUVs, vans and pickup trucks making appearances in the following games. But compared to the previously mentioned cars, or the Mercedes-Benz Unimog Type 411 that was added in the end of February, the addition of the Qashqai has become the straw that broke the camel's back for some.

Enter YouTube user Super GT, real name Steve Alvarez Brown. Super GT is a content creator and racing driver based in the UK, having starting his YouTube channel in 2011. He primarily focused on a broad variety of racing games of the era with a steady rise in popularity happening through steady, quality uploads and moving from most recent game to the next as trends changed. His first Gran Turismo video would come with the demos for Gran Turismo Sport, some seven years since his humble beginnings playing DiRT 3 and F1 2011. In the time after those initial Gran Turismo Sport videos, he has become one of the premiere influencers in the space alongside Jimmy Broadbent with over a million subscribers to his name on YouTube. Such a luxury and privilege, paired with his outright pace, has allowed him to reignite his racing career after it initially came to a halt in karting in the early 2000s with him now racing alongside Broadbent in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie with financial support from Bilstein Suspension.

Today, July 24th 2025, Super GT released a video galled "Gran Turismo 7's Car List is a TOTAL MESS," which I have had to watch as a part of writing this piece. Prior, I have never watched a single video of his; there just haven't been many people in the space I will go watch. It's just not my thing considering how much I do play racing games and have and want to do other things with my time on YouTube or otherwise. Anyways, the video premises talking about the most recent update, goes into looking at the cars that have been added in the last calendar year and then delves into the omissions, issues and irregularities that exist in GT7's racing car group system. This is done in the back drop of games like Le Mans Ultimate, Forza Motorsports 8, and iRacing being able to have the latest and greatest race cars on offer while GT7's most recent Porsche GT racing car, for example, is still from a class that became defunct in 2023 with the car itself being from 2016.

Throughout the video that's barely disguised as a wish-list video by the end, there are tidbits and nuggets that suggests he understands what Gran Turismo is suppose to be to an extent and understands that adding new cars takes time with the quality and fidelity they now have. He does understand at least to some extent that there should be weird and quirky cars in a Gran Turismo game, and that adding free content is something to be appreciative and thankful for. But if all he's effectively is asking for is for new, and some older, racing cars to be added to GT7 some three years after initial release, it makes me beg the question:

Does Super GT actually know what's going on in a Gran Turismo car list?

Ignoring Gran Turismo Sport at launch, which used a glut of then-modern race cars as the basic platform for it's online racing infrastructure and nothing more, the additions that have brought the car list to being where it should be for a Gran Turismo game. A Gran Turismo car list is suppose to have a little bit for everything and everyone, and allow everyone to try out and enjoy both the extreme, and incredibly mundane. Mundane cars to a game like Gran Turismo and Forza are some of the most important vehicles from a game design standpoint: you need something slow and relatively easy to drive to allow the player to build up to the quicker, racier offerings they will get to try later in the game. And much like Pokemon, such games also assume that there are some people out there to where this is their first game in the franchise and don't know the dynamics of something as simple as coming to a stop in a straight line.

You drive a Nissan Qashqai in Gran Turismo 7 because you've been given permission to do the silliest things to a car your aunt owns and have zero regrets about it. Within the context of that game design standpoint you use it for the Sunday Cup, win all the races, and then get a prize Subaru BRZ and progress to the next set of races. And within the much-expanded sandbox that GT7 has on offer, there is so much more that can be done with the incredible livery editor, custom races using other cars you own all tuned and upgraded to your liking, and the photography tools that are in place that gives every road car on the list so much more life than just cars that would make people who want to play Assetto Corsa Competizione but in Gran Turismo 7 happy. Priorities from a development standpoint will more often lead towards adding road cars of all shapes and sizes, over a GT3 class race car that lacks any sense of character on it's own.

Are there race cars that should be added to Gran Turismo 7? Of course there are. But much of what's been done through Gran Turismo Sport and GT7's post-launch life has been filling gaps within segments of cars and ensuring that such a vast level of experiences are possible with those road cars of all shapes in sizes. It's been about making a Gran Turismo car list even more of one at every step of the way. By this logic, the primary race car that's missing from the game is an actual GT300 class race car that would have raced at the same time as the GT500 class machines from the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship in the mid to late 1990s that are in the game. Will that happen is anyone's guess, we are three years since GT7 launched and it wouldn't be a surprise if Gran Turismo 8 took priority years ago.

But to call Gran Turismo 7's car list a "total mess" in the clickbait sense of it all ignores the basic idea that Gran Turismo was never meant to be a competitor to the likes of iRacing, Le Mans Ultimate, or Assetto Corsa Competizione. It's main competition in Forza Motorsport never fully clicked with what this franchise has been about in terms of being a much more pure celebration of the automobile. It's become the coolest automotive museum in the world, and the curator has given you the keys and told you can do whatever the hell you want. Yes, some of the exhibits you're going to walk on by compared to taking the time to enjoy others, but that's the beauty of a museum; not everyone is going to enjoy all the exhibits the same way.

And maybe wanting to completely discard that and homogenize the car list with what the rest of the realistic racing space is doing isn't the way to go and others acting like Gran Turismo Sport was the benchmark maybe need to play some of the older games.

At least Steve learned his lesson from doing more than double the speed limit in a Code 60 zone.