Ayrton Senna Tribute Thoughts

Ayrton Senna was one of the greatest racers in any discipline of motorsport- let alone Formula 1. A number of plans were underway to try to infuse Ayrton Senna's career into the realm of Gran Turismo. Update 1.08 for Gran Turismo 6 featured the Ayrton Senna Tribute material and a new Vision GT car from Mitsubishi. But for this blog post, I will only offer thoughts on the whole Ayrton Senna Tribute package. This post does NOT include any advice on how to clear the events. I may do that in a future post here on "John's Race Space."

--- Ayrton Senna Tribute Thoughts ---

Before offering thoughts, let me share with you this video to get you excited about the Ayrton Senna Tribute:


^ Gran Turismo 6 - Ayrton Senna Tribute Trailer

The Ayrton Senna Tribute is a chance for you to learn more about what made Ayrton Senna one of the all-time greatest race car drivers. Helping you feel like you are the iconic Brazilian racing superstar are a number of Time Trial challenges. You get to race three vehicles that Ayrton Senna raced in his career: his go-kart from 1980, his Formula 3 car, and the fire-breathing Lotus 97T that Senna won his first F1 race in. This package includes two older variants of Brands Hatch and Monza as well as a different version of the Silverstone Stowe course. It also adds some more PS3 Trophies for accomplishing tasks in this package.

I completed the Ayrton Senna Tribute long before compiling this blog post of ideas. I have not completed everything to where I got Gold for each event, though.

How the Ayrton Senna Tribute Works.

The Ayrton Senna Tribute features individual stages of his career. Before starting a certain challenge, you are helped to a slideshow of Ayrton Senna's illustrious past including captions to the pictures. Classical-style piano music plays in the background as you learn about Ayrton Senna. At the end of each slideshow, you are then treated to a Time Trial challenge to clear. You can win the vehicles you race with if you are able to clear the challenges with a certain score. If you leave the course or get into a collision, you will be disqualified. Trying to clear the individual challenges can be quite difficult, especially for Gold. It will take a lot of effort out of you to try to clear each challenge.

My Thoughts on the Ayrton Senna Tribute.

Some people will say this is disappinting since you don't really feel like you are engaged enough to feel like you are Ayrton Senna himself in the most intense moments of his racing career. A lot of F1 fans have considered A. Senna as a rain master, so you could conclude you could have raced a course under wet conditions. I think more probably could have been done to make the Ayrton Senna Tribute more engaging as far as the challenges are concerned. But in my view, I think the difficulty of each challenge is sufficient enough and hard enough to test even the most hardened Gran Turismo racer. Maybe the package would have benefit from having some other F1 cars and personalities to battle against in addition to Ayrton Senna. Then again, it would probably make the Ayrton Senna Tribute a bit less about Ayrton Senna. Like, what if there was a challenge where played as (for example) Alain Prost battling against A. Senna? It would make the Tribute more engaging, but this would require more licensing deals as well as sort of take away from realizing what made A. Senna so great.

Part of me says that if you want a more complete Formula 1 racing experience, go get one of the Codemasters F1 games or download a quality F1 racing mod for a great PC sim racer. Nobody said this was the most complete and thorough tribute of Ayrton Senna and his racing career. This tribute was done as best as Polyphony Digital could make it out to be. Could it be better? Sure. Could it be worse? No. If I were to grade the Ayrton Senna Tribute overall, I would grade it an A-. It has great challenge and features a well-told and well-executed look at Ayrton Senna's career. The tribute can be vastly more detailed, but you can't completely fault the effort and strides made to make the Ayrton Senna Tribute any better than it already is. If anything, this was a video game deal that got me to appreciate his racing career and his abilities more than I already respect him for.

At least... that is what I think about the Ayrton Senna Tribute. Feel free to express your own opinions.





If you haven't gotten the Update 1.08 package for Gran Turismo 6, be sure to download it. In fact, you probably should have the whole thing by now, since Update 1.09 was released not too long ago as of the initial date of this blog post (June 28, 2014).

What do you think about the Ayrton Senna Tribute in Gran Turismo 6?

As I mentioned, I may consider discussing certain aspects of the individual challenges in the Ayrton Senna Tribute. But for now, I hope you enjoyed this post and enjoyed reading my thoughts on this GT6 feature. Thank you for reading!

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