British motoring magazine evo has published a wide-ranging interview with Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi, covering everything from the challenges of tire physics to Polyphony Digital’s relationship with Sony. It was conducted at the FAT Ice Race in Zell am See, Austria, earlier this year, where Yamauchi joined Polestar as the company continued its promotional tie-in between the Polestar 5 and Gran Turismo 7. Much of the ground covered will be familiar to GTPlanet readers, but there are a few comments worth digging into, including an interesting one about the pressure Yamauchi used to face from Sony. Sony Pushback Has Eased When asked whether he has ever been told by his bosses at Sony to cut corners or that his team is taking too long to produce new games, Yamauchi gave an answer that will raise eyebrows among anyone who followed the series through the late 2000s: “Up to about Gran Turismo 5, yes. Nowadays, not so much.” Of course, Gran Turismo 5 had one of the most protracted and publicly scrutinized development cycles in the series’ history with two significant announced delays, so it’s interesting to hear Yamauchi acknowledge that corporate patience was being tested during that era. Yamauchi also repeated the now-familiar figure that a single car takes roughly eight months to complete. That covers both the graphics model and the physics work required to make it behave like the real thing, compared to roughly two hours per car back in the original Gran Turismo days. Recreating the Nürburgring Nordschleife, he said, took four years. Tires Remain the Hardest Problem On the simulation side, Yamauchi was frank about where the biggest challenge lies: tires. Components like suspension and drivetrains can be modeled with little gap between simulation and reality, but tires are a different story, with some of