I have been playing Gran Turismo a lot lately, and the one race series that most players will agree is most difficult, is the Historic Racing Car Cup, where only cars from 1979 or before are allowed to participate. The problem is, the fastest cars of this era are expensive as hell.
I find that the in-game prices are roughly analogous to a car’s real-world price. Old racing cars are rare collector’s items and so are extremely expensive, in the real world and in the game. For instance, here are all the old cars over 1 Million credits. Cars that weigh more than a ton are left out.
I have added the car’s PP (Performance Points) in the same graph to find the best value for money. PP is an estimation of a car’s performance, in large part a ratio like the car’s raw power divided by its weight. PP appears to be more than just this simple division though, it seems to include some other considerations as well, perhaps aerodynamic or suspension-based. For this exercise I consider it to be a pretty good approximation of the car’s performance. As racing drivers will learn, the size of your PP determines a lot.
As you can see, the Toyota 7 from 1970 offers the best performance and value for money by far. In fact I would say at just under 2 Million Credits, it’s a bargain. The problem is, I don’t have that much. And so:
Cars from 1979 or earlier, with more than 100HP, weighing less than a ton, and costing less than 1 Million:
If I can find a good, light, car with good value for money, and do all possible mods, and tune the suspension perfectly, then I might have a chance.
A quick note for the uninitiated is that this Cup series is broken. The Toyota 7 will readily spawn as an AI challenger, and being the fastest by far, they will spawn at the front. You as the player will spawn at the back. You can pretty much forget about beating this race against one or more Toyota 7’s with anything other than another Toyota 7. If you have one you will use the entire race to overtake the other cars, and if you run a perfect race you have a chance of winning. How then can you win if you can’t afford a Toyota 7? There is a hack we do about restarting the race over and over until you get the statistically unlikely line-up of cars which excludes the Toyota 7, and then you only have to beat one or more Chapparal cars. The Chapparal 2J is another bastard of a car that was so fast in real life that it got banned from racing. But, it is doable.
What stood out for me on this graph was the Mazda RX500. With 246BHP, weighing only 850KG, I would say that with mods it might have a chance, but 500,000Cr is more than I would like to spend on a maybe. So then what seems most promising is the 1973 Alpine A110 1600S. It only has 141HP, but a comparatively tiny weight of 715KG. Best of all, it only costs 60,200Cr.
I’ll buy one, mod it and tune it. Can I win an impossible race against banned cars, using only frugality and reckless driving? We’ll see.
Car data and car images are taken from the Gran Turismo wiki