Menu Book 31 in Gran Turismo 7 requires you to collect three specific models of Porsche and, unless you want to pay hundreds of thousands of Credits for them, that means you have to place third or better in the three Porsche Cup races in order to win the required cars. This feels like an exciting opportunity until you realise that the difficulty ramps up a little at this point. We wouldn’t call it a difficulty spike, but you definitely might feel a little pinch here. Fortunately, we’ve assembled a guide to how to tune your Porsche, and how to tackle each of the three Porsche Cup tracks in GT7.
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Porsche Cup — Tuning Guide
When you complete Menu Book 30, you’ll be awarded one of three Porsche cars, and you might as well use whichever one you win. All Porsches are awesome and, once they’ve been tuned to 650 PP, are pretty similar in terms of performance. The first thing your Porsche needs is a wing, so go to GT Auto and get the biggest wing you can find. The engine, and therefore most of the weight, is at the rear of a Porsche, and you’re going to need that wing to keep the back end from sliding out.
Next, get Intermediate Tires from the Extreme tab of the Tuning Shop. It can randomly start raining in the middle of any one of these races, and if you don’t have Intermediates fitted, you won’t be able to control your car on the wet track, and your race will be as good as over.
If your Porsche is heavier than 1,100 kg, then buy weight reduction until it’s not. Otherwise, you can ignore weight reduction and focus on getting your bhp up to about 450. With weight at about 1,100 kg, and bhp at about 450, you’ll probably be pretty close to 650 PP. You can make up the difference with upgrades to your suspension, brakes, or transmission if you want. But the Normal versions of those parts are already pretty good on a Porsche, and the wing and tires will help a lot anyway, so maybe just buy yourself a little more bhp instead.
Porsche Cup — Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps Guide
This is the easiest of the Porsche Cup circuits, mainly because there are three opportunities for some really blatant corner cutting, but also because most of its turns are smooth curves that aren’t tricky to negotiate. Corner cutting will forfeit your Clean Race Bonus, but this guide is about winning, not about clean racing. So, cut the left-hander at the top of the steep hill shortly after the start, cut the S-bend soon after that, and cut the tight S-bend just before the finish line. You still need to slow down to take these, but not as much as if you were driving like a responsible adult.
Porsche Cup — Autodrome Lago Maggiore
This is also a fairly easy track, but there are a few tricky parts to look out for. Your Porsche will be desperate to oversteer around those first two sharp bends, so accelerate especially gently when exiting them. The bend in front of the grandstand looks like a very wide, open hairpin as you approach it, but it actually tightens quite sharply at the end, so you’ll have to brake pretty hard when you’re about halfway around it. The longest straight — the one approaching a banked hairpin with a lot of sand and Total signs around it — has a sharp dip in it, and it might be that your Porsche tries to fly when it hits the crest. Easing off just a little as you go over the crest will solve this problem. You also need to brake extra early here, as you’re approaching that hairpin on a steep downhill.
Porsche Cup — Nürburgring Nordschleife
This is by far the hardest Porsche Cup race to win, mainly because it’s one lap of a very long track, so you don’t get the opportunity to memorize the circuit and get into a rhythm. Your biggest obstacle is probably going to be over-caution. You’re unlikely to remember every turn, and there are a lot of blind bends and crests, so your instinct will be to play it safe and often slow down more than you need to. There are a lot of bends in this track, but many of them are in sequences that you can get through very fast by taking an almost straight racing line that passes through each apex. Finally, the straight is really long, so you’ll be able to pick up a lot of speed. But it’s also right at the end of the track, so this is the one place where it’s better to be a little cautious. You don’t want to drive a perfect lap all the way up to that point, then mess up the left-hander because you braked too late and too little. It’s a fairly easy left-hander, but you will be going very fast, so break quite hard before you pass under the Bilsten bridge.
