There’s Convincing Evidence That Sebring Raceway Will Be in Grand Theft Auto 6

Let me get this out of the way straight off the top: if you’re a GTA superfan, what I’m about to share is probably old news. See, we’re not really a gaming outlet, and while several of us on staff are long-time Grand Theft Auto players (your author has been playing since the top-down days), we’re not dialed in to the everyday happenings. So when Adam stumbled upon this crowdsourced map of the state of Leonida (the fictional home of Vice City, where GTA 6 will be set) and saw a location marked “Gellhorn International Raceway” that looked an awful lot like the real-world Sebring, we were both caught by surprise—and it immediately got us thinking: Has GTA ever really had a race track?

Surprisingly, the answer is no. Racing has been a GTA sub-game for pretty much as long as the franchise has been in existence, but it has always come in the form of either street or off-road competition, not anything involving an honest-to-goodness, asphalt-surface race track. Vice City had a small dirt track; GTA 5 has a horse racing track that doubles as a dirt oval and an improvised off-road course near Sandy Shores Airfield (where Trevor bases his flying operation in the game’s later acts), but the count of actual road courses in the GTA franchise stands at zero.

But take a look at this excerpt from the west-central part of the theoretical map. Everything in grey here was part of the 2022 leak that first revealed the track’s potential existence within the GTA 6 universe. Anything shaded in red is still unconfirmed.

Yes, that’s a lot of uncertainty, but the evidence is reasonably convincing. That’s Sebring’s “Sunset Bend” (turn 17) visible next to the (5) label on the map. Though the name is no longer apt; the real-life version earned that title because it faces due west, not northeast. The aerial image of the track below has been rotated to match the orientation of the in-game track just to highlight the similarities.

Not only is Sebring duplicated here, but it appears to be part of a larger motorsports complex. North of turn 17, we see what appears to be the paddock and staging area/tree for a drag strip. Internet sleuths have already pointed out similarities to Gainesville Raceway, but the evidence isn’t quite as compelling as it is for the road course.

The folks who went combing through the 2022 leaks found more than just a map—they found a name referenced in code for one of the game’s world events. This is where the “Gellhorn International Raceway” label came from, and either Rockstar is trolling us or there’s even more evidence to support its existence thanks to the game’s second official trailer.

You can watch for yourself at the above link (jump ahead to about 1:57), but Lucia is sporting a shirt with some conspicuous branding. The eagle-eyed fandom folks went a step further and identified the car on her shirt as a Dominator ASP (the GTA world equivalent of a Mustang Cobra), but the only thing that matters for our purposes is the “Gellhorn International” bit scrawled across the top.

As our editor-in-chief Kyle Cheromcha pointed out in The Drive’s Slack, Gellhorn could be a reference to Martha Gellhorn, a World War II correspondent married to Ernest Hemingway, and the only female journalist present at D-Day. Motorsport fans know that Sebring was built on a former WWII airfield.

Again, this is old news, and it has yet to be hard-confirmed by Rockstar, but it does make sense on spec. Including a fully fledged race track for the first time would give Rockstar a hub location around which it can build a much richer, more diverse racing sub-game for GTA 6’s inevitable online mode. Imagine something that functions similar to the way festival sites work in Microsoft’s Forza Horizon open-world racing series. Those games typically have several such hub locations, but Grand Theft Auto has more going on than just wheel-to-wheel shenanigans, so a single location would likely be plenty.

If this turns out to be accurate, Grand Theft Auto 6 may appeal to an even broader audience than previous installments. We’re certainly intrigued; too bad we still have seven months left before we find out for sure.

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