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SEMA Gran Turismo Award

The SEMA Gran Turismo Award logo, without a year, as used by both Buick Special and the HPA Motorsports Stage II R32 in GT5's Used Car Dealership.

The SEMA Gran Turismo Awards is a set of awards given by Gran Turismo to the best cars on display at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas. Each recipient between 2003 to 2018 have been rewarded with having their vehicle added to the game in a future release.

The award was discontinued after the 2018 edition, likely due to Yamauchi's commitments with organizing the Gran Turismo World Series.

In Gran Turismo Sport, GT Awards winners are coded so that the manufacturer is "GT Awards (SEMA)", rather than their individual tuners, and are sold from the Gran Turismo dealer. This behavior was reverted in Gran Turismo 7, in which tuners are now recognized as individual manufacturers once more.

Cafรฉ Description (GT7)[]

This is a collection of awesome cars that have won the "SEMA Gran Turismo Award" that celebrates cool, high-performance cars. If you're wondering what SEMA is, it stands for Specialty Equipment Market Association, a group established in 1963 to bring together businesses involved in manufacturing and marketing of high-performance automotive parts. And, they put on the famous SEMA Show, an automotive aftermarket trade show held in Las Vegas every year on the first week of November.

The SEMA GT Award was a title presented by Gran Turismo that was part of a sponsorship deal that began in 2003. In the U.S., there has been a deep-rooted culture for customization and performance tuning of cars for a long time. American car enthusiasts improved the performance and style of their cars, beginning with hot rods in the 1930s. The SEMA GT Award pays homage to the shining jewels of this custom car culture. It provides the fans around the world to experience these cars through Gran Turismo.

This Mach Forty was the recipient of the GT Award in 2012, produced by Eckert's Rod and Custom of Oregon. At first glance,[1] it looks like a 1969 Ford Mustang... but on the inside, it's a monster machine with a mid-mounted Ford GT V-8 engine! The SEMA GT Award has been given not only to American hot rods, but to European- and Japanese-tuned cars as well.

The Fugu Z is based on the Nissan 240Z is a winner from 2015, and its owner Sung Kang is an actor from the "Fast and the Furious" movies. The Rocket Bunny body kit is especially menacing, and the car comes powered by a naturally aspirated version of the famed RB26 Skyline GT-R engine.

More than a few winners of the SEMA GT Awards began life as unassuming road cars, but then transformed into tarmac-eating monster machines. The 2018 winner by the Greening Auto Company took a relatively compact Maverick and turned it into a hot rod. It was packed with a fully tuned 427 cu-in. V-8, which resulted in a 200-mph top speed (approximately 322 km/h)! it's all about seeing how far you can take your dreams with your car, and the SEMA GT Award is a perpetual embodiment of that endeavor.

Winners[]

Year Car Picture
2003 Buick Special Buick Special '62
2004 HPA Motorsports Stage II R32 HPA Motorsports Stage II R32 '04
2005 AEM S2000 AEM S2000 (SEMA Gran Turismo Awards 2005)
2006 Art Morrison Corvette '60 Art Morrison Corvette '60 (SEMA Gran Turismo Awards 2006)
2007 2007 HPA Motorsports FT565 twin turbo Audi TT HPA Motorsports FT565 twin turbo Audi TT (SEMA Gran Turismo Awards 2007)
2008 High End Performance G37 High End Performance G37 (SEMA Gran Turismo Awards 2008)
2009 Grand Touring Garage 1970 Ford Mustang Trans-Cammer Grand Touring Garage 1970 Ford Mustang Trans-Cammer (SEMA Gran Turismo Awards 2009)
2010 Stielow Engineering Red Devil Stielow Engineering Red Devil
2011 Pozzi MotorSports Camaro RS Pozzi MotorSports Camaro RS
2012 Eckert's Rod & Custom Mach Forty Eckerts Rod & Custom Mach Forty (GT7)
2013 Chris Holstrom Concepts 1967 Chevy Nova Chris Holstrom Concepts 1967 Chevy Nova
2014 Roadster Shop Rampage Roadster Shop Rampage
2015 GReddy Fugu Z Greddy Fugu Z
2016 Wicked Fabrication GT 51 Wicked Fabrication GT 51
2017 Garage RCR Civic Garage RCR Civic
2018 Greening Auto Company Maverick Greening Auto Company 1971 Ford Maverick

Trivia[]

  • Despite it never winning the SEMA Gran Turismo Awards, the 1932 Ford Roadster '63 appears in the explanatory text relating to the related GT Cafรฉ extra book (No. 22, added in GT7 version 1.34). Although it is possible it appears there to allow the explanation of the hot rod tuning culture, as the Ford Roadster is a byproduct of that.
    • It also appears at the end of the explanatory text with the GT Awards cars included with GT7 as of version 1.34, where the extra book was added.
  • In GT5, one of the title screen scenes display all Premium SEMA winners being featured, alongside the RE Amemiya FD3S RX-7, that never won the SEMA Gran Turismo Awards.
  • HPA Motorsports is the only organization to win the SEMA GT Awards more than once, in 2004 and 2007.
    • HPA is also the only organization to win the SEMA GT Awards with a European base car.
  • Chevrolet-based vehicles won the most awards with five (2006, 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2014), with Ford behind at four (2009, 2012, 2016, and 2018). Honda (2005 and 2017) is the only other base manufacturer to win the award more than once, unless Infiniti (2008) and Nissan (2015) are counted together.
  • All GT Awards winners are treated as American cars (Canadian in the case of HPA cars in PlayStation 3-era games). This resulted in GT Awards winners not based on an American car being eligible to compete in events restricted to American cars (except for the HPA cars in PS3-era games), instead of Japanese or European events, depending on the base car's country of origin.

Gallery[]

Notes[]

  1. โ†‘ Comma was misplaced in "first" in the original text
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