Gran Turismo 5’s release date has been pushed back a number of times already and is believed to somewhere around the end of this month--fingers crossed--but already we have news on the next iteration of the popular racing sim. No doubt still years away from release (GT5 took more than 2,000 days to fully develop), Gran Turismo 6 will feature a Salsa Red 1969 Chevrolet Camaro in its lineup of cars, just the like the one seen here.

The game’s creator, Kazunori Yamauchi, was on hand at SEMA last week as this was the location for the fifth game’s original grand release party until it was pushed back. Nevertheless, Sony still made a presentation at SEMA and as it has in the past several years held its Gran Turismo Awards contest where the winning car is converted into digital form and included in the next version of the game.

Yamauchi personally picked the 1969 Chevrolet Camaro modified by GM engineer Mark Stielow. The car features a 7.0-liter V-8 engine with a healthy 762 horsepower and more than 800 pound-feet of torque on tap. The body of the classic muscle car is completely original except for the hood, which is aluminum.

Developers from Polyphony Digital, the company behind the Gran Turismo series, will eventually visit Stielow’s garage to take photos of the car and recordings of its engine. Last year’s winner, incidentally, was a custom 1970 Mustang from Oregon, which should be appearing in GT5 when the game is released, whenever that is.

[Wheels Blog]

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