Welcome to the Top Drives: Japan Pro Tour Update!

Read on to find out about the new car models, car corrections, features, bug fixes and more.

NEW CARS

The new Top Drives update brings with it a roster of hugely desirable road and race cars from some of the most notable Japanese manufacturers, Nissan, Infiniti, Suzuki and Subaru.

Infiniti is very much the new kid on the block. Despite its infancy and luxury focus – Infiniti is to Nissan what Lexus is to Toyota – it has started to make an impact on the performance car world. Amongst the show cars to hotted-up SUVs, its most tantalising concept is the Q50 Eau Rouge. It isn't just its Spa Francorchamps-inspired name that raises the heart rate of any car enthusiast, this hardcore saloon has a 560bhp twin-turbocharged V6 from a Nissan GT-R, four-wheel drive and a 0 to 60 time of just 3.7 seconds and is part of this new update.

Skylines and GT-Rs, that’s what comes to mind when we think of fast Nissans but its back catalogue isn’t just all-wheel drive monsters. There are homologation special hot hatches like the Pulsar VZR N1, cutely-named Silvias – especially the more menacing Nismo 270R. And don’t forget Nissan’s late 1990s Le Mans escapades with its incredibly fast R390 GT1 race car. All of which will now be available in the game. Still, if it really is just GT-Rs that get you hot under the collar, you’ll be pleased to learn the most iconic racing Skyline is also being added to Top Drives, the Calsonic R32.

If you’re looking for the GT-R’s rally equivalent, your search will lead you to Subaru very quickly and to an equally recognisable competition car, the Group A 1995 Impreza resplendent in its yellow and blue livery and its famous gold wheels. Subaru’s rally success has spawned a selection of remarkable and deeply impressive road cars, including the Impreza WRX P1 to the more current WRX STI Type RA. It even found a way of working its rally-bred drivetrains into its more practical bodies, creating cars like the broadly talented Forester STi.

While not as universally successful as Nissan or Subaru in its motorsport ventures, Suzuki has a 1990s competition car in its history that’s at least as familiar as the Calsonic R32 Skyline and Group A rally Impreza, the Escudo Pikes Peak. This purpose-built hill climb car, which looks to be 90 percent rear wing and splitter, is stunningly fast with a 0 to 60 time of just 2.2 seconds.

Motorbikes might be where Suzuki really flexes its performance muscles but, thankfully, it puts the same low-weight high-energy ethos into its sports cars. You can see it in the Cappuccino and explicitly in the bike-engined Hayabusa Sport Prototype, both of which you can now collect in Top Drives.

The complete list of the new cars can be accessed in this sheet.

CHANGES

• The Inventory Item pop-up (e.g. Ancient Fossil) has been rescaled.

• Renault brand logo has been updated in accordance with the new brand guidelines.

• Nissan brand logo has been updated in accordance with the new brand guidelines.

• Added the ability to lock cars in the Car Selection screen.

• The Holding Pool timer now accurately reflects when the next car is due to expire.

• The three Volkswagen Type 2 cars previously used as tickets have been ‘un-prize carded’. This frees up garage space for those cars only ever considered prize cards as a proxy for being tickets for challenges. As part of this move, only low rarity cars which were prize cars specifically to be used as tickets will be ‘un-prize carded’

• Airfield Airplane Slalom is now a dirt/mud surface, rather than asphalt, better matching its visuals.

• Some balance changes to score accumulation across a number of challenges.

• 75-125 accumulates slightly slower.

• Car park (dry/wet) accumulates slightly faster.

• Hill Climb (asphalt, dirt, dirt rolling, gravel, mud, snow, sand dune) accumulates slower.

• Frozen River Slalom accumulates slower.

• River Sprint accumulates slower.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed an issue which caused RQ100 cars to display RQ1 instead.

• Fixed an issue in the player tutorial where it was not triggering after losing the first race.

• Fixed an issue with the Challenge panel on the home screen not displaying the correct colour when locked.

• Fixed an issue that would cause the game to freeze when selecting enough flexible criteria that no cars fulfil the requirements and then going to the normal filter.

• Fixed an issue that would cause the game to soft lock when using the RQ slider in the All Cars screen.

• Fixed an issue with the slider functionality in the holding pool that prevented moving the right selection point in certain filters.

• Fixed an issue in the Challenge Requirements tab whereby the Items Required to Play restriction could duplicate. The missing artwork displayed as a white box due to be fixed in a future update.

• Fixed an issue whereby the game would occasionally crash on the first Round of the Challenge, consuming the Item and rendering the game unplayable.

• Minor localisation fixes.

CAR CORRECTIONS & RARITY CHANGES

As with all of our previous updates, a series of corrections, rarity changes and RQ changes are coming in the Japan Pro Tour update.

This time we have over 150 corrections to existing cars, mostly Japanese brands to maintain appropriate hierarchy after adding a new batch of cars. There is also a small number of rarity changes, as well as the RQ changes.

Once again we would like to express our gratitude to the car corrections team who voluntarily help us enhance the authenticity of your gameplay experience.

You can access the Public Car Corrections sheet by following the links below:

Japan Pro Tour Public Car Corrections sheet

Japan Pro Tour Rarity Changes tab

Japan Pro Tour RQ Changes tab

Japan Pro Tour New Cars tab

As always, you can make suggestions for future corrections and report any inconsistencies in the dedicated forum thread: https://forums.hutchgames.com/categories/car-corrections

ON THE FUTURE OF CAR CORRECTIONS

Top Drives has a record number of licensed cars across the whole mobile games industry and it’s essential that the cars have accurate performance stats, corresponding to their real-life counterparts, to ensure correct simulation in races. The stats are not limited to conventional 0-60 time or handling, but also include weight, power, and tyre type.

The whole premise of the game is to simulate real-life scenarios, but with the sheer amount of cars that we have, cars that are being added on top of the older collections usually have an effect on the latter, so balancing of the stats for both new and old cars is required to ensure the simulation continues to run as expected. Additionally, some cars might not have had exactly the correct stats when originally added to the game, so we must look at them again and correct them based on the best sources available to us.

Some existing cars were identified for correction for this update that if corrected would have been too disruptive as they would have changed Rarity bands (into or out of Ultra Rare and Epic). These corrections were held back from this release so players may notice some tire inconsistency between similar cars (2016 Subaru Forester has Standard and many newly introduced Foresters have All-Surface), handling inconsistency (2010 Nissan Pathfinder with higher handling than the 2016) or a combination of acceleration/handling or tire (several Infinitis). While not ideal, it was deemed a priority to not have disruptive changes to players even if it meant having some temporary inconsistencies.

These corrections will be addressed later this year as we move forward with the ‘Perform-a-Like’ initiative. This involves removing an existing car that requires significant correction and replacing it with a new car of similar RQ (not necessarily the exact same RQ or manufacturer). Then the corrected existing car will be reintroduced as a car that no player has at it’s correct RQ and rarity. This process allows correction with a minimal amount of disruption to players.

THANK YOU!

That’s it for today, and enjoy the new update!