Tickets for what’s now the first live event in the 2026 Gran Turismo World Series are now on sale, with Milan’s Teatro Lirico set to host the opening battles of the new championship season on May 23rd.
The news comes on the eve of the original first round, announced to great fanfare during the 2025 World Final to be staged in Abu Dhabi before world events threw a spanner (and a few drones) into the works. With attendee safety — and even travel to the event — in jeopardy, this event was cancelled and the calendar reorganised. We’re yet to find out the fate of this round, whether it will be rescheduled for later in the year or relocated, but the event in Milan has now moved from second to first.
As we’ve seen across the past couple of years, the event will be a single-day affair with all of the racing action crammed into a brisk schedule covering just six hours. After the doors open at 1300 UTC there’ll be an unspecified “support event” (usually a Pro-Am featuring media and content creator guests), followed by the Manufacturers Cup from 1500 UTC and then finally the Nations Cup from 1730 UTC.
The venue itself is the Teatro Lirico — literally “opera house” — near the heart of Milan and just a couple of hundred metres from the famous Piazza del Duomo and the cathedral after which it takes its name. It’s the largest place of worship within Italy itself, while the piazza was a hub for 2026 Winter Paralympic Games.
Originally created as a theatre for the masses, as opposed to the high-society Teatro alla Scala — the world-famous La Scala — nearby, Teatro Lirico was built on the foundations of a school. Giuseppe Piermarini, who also designed La Scala, created the four-tiered horseshoe interior and facade which exist to this day despite the Lirico’s descent into hardship twice in the past 250 years.
A second redevelopment began in 2017, with the theatre reopening and renamed Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber after a pioneering Milanese musician in December 2021. That was actually the very same weekend that Valerio Gallo, the only Italian winner of the Gran Turismo World Series, collected his trophy at the FIA Prize Giving ceremony in Paris.
Depending on configuration the theatre can hold around 1,000 people, though we’re expecting the larger stage area needed for the GTWS and any vehicle reveals to trim that down to the usual 800 or so. In any case, tickets for the event on May 23rd are on sale now.
There’s two tiers of tickets, with both granting all-day access to the event and essentially comprising a regular ticket and a seat upgrade ticket. The standard, “Classic” ticket is €25 with a concession for under-18s at €15, while the upgraded “Premium” option is another €5 on top of that at €30 or €20 for U18s. Although previous events have added a refreshment entitlement or a bonus piece of memorabilia, neither appears the case this time round.
As for the event, it’ll be a first chance to see the 2026 finalists in action representing both themselves in the Nations Cup and their brands in Manufacturers Cup. For this round it’ll be the Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) drivers in the Manufacturers Cup — with the Americas and Asia-Oceania drivers in the other two rounds — while the Nations Cup line-up remains constant across all four events.