GranTurismo

What do Formula One drivers drive in their downtime? Well, when you're a two-time world champion like Fernando Alonso, you get to drive pretty much whatever you want. That is, assuming the team you're driving for isn't owned by a specific automaker. Then you'll need to drive whatever the provide you with. And in Alonso's case, notwithstanding his solo 2001 debut season with Minardi-Cosworth, he's pretty much only driven for automaker-owned teams: Renault, McLaren-Mercedes, then back to Renault and now Ferrari.

Perhaps Polyphony Digital should just go into the commercial rendering business. Gran Turismo 5 remains stuck behind a palisade of silence, but new trailers for the game are thrown over the barriers to the salivating hordes every couple of weeks.

Marketing does funny things. Recently the word "coupe" has been rendered null and void of meaning by crafty marketing types behind cars like the Mercedes-Benz CLS, BMW X6 and Volkswagen CC, while the BMW 5 Series Gran Turismo has sucked every last ounce of truth, honesty and passion from the term "Gran Turismo." It's now just advertising flim-flam. The BMW 8 Series was a grand tourer. The 535i Gran Turismo? We hear it's very practical...

Just when we thought we were going to wait until the end of March to get our hands on Gran Turismo 5, our friends at Joystiq tell us that Polyphony Digital will release a demo version of hotly anticipated racing game on December 17. The demo will be available on the Playstation Network for download both in Europe and North America, giving long-patient fans a taste of what the full game will be like when it finally arrives in stores.

The famed automotive pot-stirrers at Autocar are at it again. According to two blurbs from the UK publication, BMW's new 5 Series Gran Turismo may spawn at least one less costly, less powerful variant, but a high-performance M version is apparently off the table.

When Gran Turismo 4 was launched in Japan for the Playstation 2, George Bush was just getting ready to start his second term and the Chrysler 300 was the big buzz in the auto world. In other words, January 10, 2005 was a very long time ago, and we're probably going to have to wait a while longer before we can finally get our hands on the highly anticipated Gran Turismo 5. After half a decade of waiting for GT5, Sony has finally announced that the racing franchise will go on sale - in Japan - in March 2010. That's six months after the PSP version of the game goes on sale, and we still don't know when we'll be able to get our hands on the PS3 version here in the States.