The BVLGARI Aluminium Vision Gran Turismo is so, so close to being everything a VGT car ought to be.
#bvlgari #aluminium #queen
Vision Gran Turismo cars are cars made specifically for the Gran Turismo games, and thus are almost always exclusive to the GT series. One would expect then, that these bespoke creations would be highlights and selling points of the franchise, but on the contrary, their high price tags, lack of customisability, and oftentimes wonky handling mean that they're among the most useless and reviled cars in the game. Winding the clock back on these traditions however, the BVLGARI Aluminium VGT seems tailor–made to tick (and tock) all the relevant GT7 boxes: it looks good, drives okay, isn't unrealistically fast, has a roofless Barchetta body style that is sure to be a hit with VR users, and most importantly to me, is eligible for all four of the game's big money–making events, completely trivialising the WTC600 and WTC700 events with its racecar–rivalling fuel economy. Just the fact that it can very quickly and easily make back its 1 million credit asking price is enough for me to recommend it on its own, but that's hardly where the good news ends for the Bulgari!
I've had my scepticism on whether a fashion brand could actually make a car drive well, but upon first laying eyes on the car, I can't help but to feel like they've got it more right than most modern car makers! There's none of the bloat, power creep, awful touchscreens, or thick A–pillars that plague modern cars with the Aluminium VGT, and it's so refreshing to see the creative liberty offered by the VGT programme used not to create something childish and useless like a laser propelled origami or a Mars Rover with no rendered interior, but instead to actually create a pure driving machine free of modern day safety and emissions regulations. It even sports hidden headlights! In 2024! There's no logical reason for those, but it's just so cool! That in itself ought to make the car an instant darling to most car lovers, even if the illuminated area by the centre headlights are woeful at best.
Unfortunately, as with most things pertaining to fashion, the Bulgari does trade in some practicality for style, and those that have attempted Week 48's Special Challenge will probably tell you, the centre mounted, sheathed headlights of the Bulgari, while exceedingly cool, illuminates only a narrow area intensely, leaving very little peripheral visibility. For a car with "Vision" in its name, it gives the driver surprisingly little in the black of night. Here's the fashionable Aluminium VGT and a similarly stylish, but also very practical Mazda3 Gr.4 sat in the same spot of Bathurst's pit lane, and you can see for yourself just how bad the laser pointer of a headlight is on the Bulgari:
BVLGARI Aluminium VGT:
Mazda3 Gr.4:
While the headlights may compromise practicality for style, the brake lights are just outright stupid. Like most modern cars, the Aluminium VGT comes with three brake lights, two to the sides, and one high mount light in the centre, nestled in a valley between the roll hoops. The problem is that someone in their infinite wisdom and/or artistic trip also decided to make the rear wing double as a flip–up airbrake, which completely blocks out the middle brake light the very moment the brakes are applied. I can't... I don't even have a witty remark about that. Did anyone playtest this at all? How did anyone greenlight these brake lights? Airbrakes and active wings are hardly a new thing in this industry, you know?
(Cough) Anyway, in keeping with the trend of subtle style, the stats on the Bulgari are modest, but extremely capable, producing 394HP (294kW) from a naturally aspirated engine, although its cylinder count, arrangement, and displacement are all left a complete mystery. Despite revving to a heady 9,500rpm, this mystery engine has such healthy mid–range torque that it feels as if there's a small turbo or motor helping it breathe down low. That miracle engine is strapped midships, driving the rear wheels via a flappy paddle 7–speed gearbox. That well oiled clockwork of a drivetrain alone would ensure any production car today would be pretty brisk, but this roofless package weighs in lighter than most ND Roadster grades at a nice and even 1,000kg (2,205lbs), making sure that time truly flies with the Bulgari.
Those numbers might look unassuming, especially by VGT standards, but it's only when the car is ran alongside very stiff competition that the sheer speed of the Bulgari creeps into one's consciousness, like the merciless, indifferent march of time. On the track, any semblance of modesty and restraint is completely lost when the Aluminium VGT effortlessly outruns a Suzuki VGT despite the Suzuki having more power, less mass, a hybrid system, and gripper Sports Soft tyres, or when it casually embarrasses a Ferrari 458 no problem. It also fought a higher rated 992 GT3 RS on equal footing, and it's capable of overwhelming slicks–shod Gr.4 racecars around a relatively tight track like Laguna Seca! Throughout the week, I simply couldn't find anything within reason to compare against the Bulgari's on–track capabilities, and that's only taking into account its raw pace; the Bulgari also has racecar levels of fuel efficiency thanks to its lightness: it has more than enough mileage in one full tank for an easy no–stop around the Tokyo grind race, completely trivialising the event, and can do 8 laps and change flat out around Sard A's grind race as well, making it viable in the 800PP event despite being almost a whole hundred PP below said limit on Racing Soft tyres.
Time tells no lies, and the Bulgari is undisputedly quick around any racetrack. It's just... driving it is a pain, personally, and that holds doubly true for anyone else I happen to collect with me as I wreck the extremely nervous Bulgari on the track. First things first: the Bulgari comes with incredibly skinny tyres. Of course, the game doesn't provide us the exact section width of these massive 22–inch steamrollers, but these tyres look like they were sized for style first and performance second, and bafflingly for an RMR car, don't appear to be staggered front to rear. Even for a car as light as the Aluminium VGT, the grip that these skinny Sport Hard tyres provide is extremely lacking for the speeds that this thing is capable of. A car can have many problems and imperfections, but to say that it has terrible tyres is kind of like saying the face of a watch is really opaque... it's a real discussion ender.
The most immediate of the litany of problems arising from the lack of grip is the time it takes the Bulgari to stop, better measured with a sundial than a stopwatch. The suspension setup, as already noted by many before me, is incredibly stiff: stiffer than most Gr.4 racecars, and so there's little to no pitch and roll to load up these skinny road legal tyres to dig any grip out of them, not to mention making the Aluminium VGT jump across several time zones when hitting kerbs. The final screw in the case of the Aluminium VGT is the Limited Slip Differential in this car: I've found that whoever is in charge of giving fictional cars their default LSD values at PD, such as the Genesis X GR3 and the Mazda Roadster NR-A*, really, really likes setting the differential to be stupidly tight, resulting in an extremely nervous and snappy car that struggles immensely with understeer one moment, and then snaps suddenly to oversteer when the front grip overwhelms the rears. These cars are also a bloody disaster around kerb jumps like the Inner Loop of Watkins Glen necessitates, and completely trip over themselves navigating corners with sharp elevation changes like the Corkscrew of Laguna Seca. It can't put down power at all out of turns, while ALSO wearing out the rear tyres in no time at all with the incessant slipping and snapping of the rear. While overall tyre longevity is good thanks to the Aluminium VGT's light weight, the disparity between the front and rear tyre life is so bad that I'm forced to run a front -3 Brake Balance just to even out the tyre wear front to rear. Fitting a differential as tightly binding as that to a sports car is like asking an athlete to run with both their shoes tied together, and I really don't understand why the diff needs to be this tight in a car that has such stiff suspension and minimal lateral load shifts. It feels set up to drift or something, and one always needs a quick flash of counter steer primed at the ready when taking corners in the Bulgari. In a smaller, much slower car with communicative Comfort tyres like the Roadster, sure, it's fun. It might even be quicker to slide around. In a car that does speeds greatly exceeding those of Gr.4 racers, and with horrible Sports tyres that let go so much quicker at their limits? Yeah, ain't nobody got time for dat!
*I'm aware the Roadster NR-A is a real car, but I don't believe they actually scanned a real one for the game.
Oh, and by the way, aside from tyres, power, mass, and brake balance, nothing else about the driving dynamics of the Aluminium VGT can be changed; not the suspension setup, not the LSD, not the downforce, and certainly no wide bodies to give fatter tyres. And this is the part that perplexes me to no end: with other VGT cars, one could maybe argue that the way those drive is the automaker's adamant vision, and out of respect for their business partners, PD disallows us players to mess with the setups. But why would the Bulgari be similarly restricted like that? At the risk of sounding completely disrespectful, does the bloke who drew up the Aluminium VGT as a styling exercise even know what a diff is? Would they really mind if we tweaked it to make the car suit us better? It doesn't even change the look of the car! If I buy a $5,000 watch from Bulgari, are they not even going to let me adjust the strap length to fit my wrist, or change the time to match my time zone? This is just inexcusably dumb, and it holds a deeply flawed car with so much potential back from ever realising any of it.
The BVLGARI Aluminium VGT may be one of the most useful VGT cars that's easy to recommend in GT7 for its money–making capabilities, but that's a niche that's so specific to GT7, and I fear that its flaws will persist much longer than its strengths when it comes time to transition into a later game. That is to say that, ironically for a car inspired by a classic chronograph, I have a feeling that the Aluminium VGT isn't a car that time will be particularly kind to.
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