Once you climb aboard, start searching for a pedal that’s supposed to be on the right! When you find it, you can use it to control time. Push is hard and, in an instant, everything around you will start flowing. The landscape will become blurry and you’ll be closer to the horizon than you’ve ever been. Push it even more and you’ll feel like you’ve just entered a Dali painting.
And this is just the visual part of the equation, but we must not forget the audio one. Your brain will literally be massaged with tens of thousands of explosions every minute. The rush of emotions fills you up inside and you get a chain reaction of pleasure.
However, the second you want to pull your head out of the many cylinders under the hood, your world is translated into another dimension. Now, it’s like you’re living the notes of Chopin. Your entire body levitates and you perceive things like you’re in a dream. There are only two things that remind you of the fact that this is real life. The road beneath you, which moves at a staggering pace, and a little dial in front of you, which shows triple digits.
Congratulations, you are living the Grand Tourer experience!
You see, GTs or Gran Turismo cars, as Italians call them, have been around, like we said, since the 20’s. These are pieces of machinery that are so simple, yet so overwhelmingly complex: they do nothing more than fulfill the basic purpose of every automobile - allow humans to cover distances - but the way in which this happens crosses the border of engineering, entering the realm of magic.
However, Grand Tourers have changed dramatically over the years. When GTs appeared, the automotive industry was not ready to give birth to creations that could really be called refined. This is because under all that leather and wood lay a technical part that was far from the ideal standard of reliability and refinement.
Modern times have allowed the Grand Tourers to truly show their dual character. Drive a modern GT, and you’ll be able to switch between the “limousine” and “supercar” mode in the blink of an eye.
So, while in the early 20th century a GT was a raw mechanical beast that had been trained to seem docile, computers now make the transition from whisper to whoop at the touch of a button.
Only in a GT can you cover mile after mile at needle-frightening speeds and not feel a thing, if this is what you want. And it’s not just maths, like smooth suspension+comfortable seats+generous size+ power, as, like we said, these cars also have to offer staggering performance.
Of course, there are multiple kinds of Grand Tourers, with the breeds being defined by a simple principle: the balance between comfort and performance. There are cars like the Bentley Continental GT, which offer the latter while appearing to clearly favor the first, creations like the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, which do exactly the opposite, and vehicles like the Jaguar XKR, which tend to be impartial.
A long time ago (the time-playing nature of GTs makes this article exclude exact time references), the motorsport world embraced this designation too, referring to the racing incarnation of go-fast road cars.
There are multiple classes, from GT1 (the furthest from the road specification) to GT4, with this scheme having been partially translated to the street, where Porsche uses the GT2 and GT3 (together with their variations) designations to offer racing cars for the road. However, we are not here to talk about that, but about the road experience offered by a Grand Tourer.
Like we said, this is the kind of car which shows you that a suspension doesn’t have to fracture spines in order to put hundreds of horsepower on the road. Of course, you won’t get 100 percent, neither of the performance offered by supercars, nor of the waftability luxury sedans come with, but you get a compromise that comes as close as possible to offering the best of both worlds. You get... a big smile on your face everytime you even look at a car that belongs to this breed.
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