There’s a good chance that if you happened to fire up your PS3 this morning for some Gran Turismo racing action you were taken by surprise at the update prompt. "What’s this?" you said, bleary-eyed and still trying to shake off the morning cobwebs, "some sort of tiny update that fixes unnoticable bugs?" No, no dear friend, it’s so much more than that.

First off, there are three new cars to test out, assuming you have the in-game cash to unlock them. You can now tear up the roads with the Lotus Evora (100,000 credits) Ferrari California (300,000 credits), or the brand new concept car, the GT by Citroen (1,000,000 credits). The GT concept car was actually revealed to the public yesterday in Paris, and is available today in GT 5 Prologue, talk about quick turnaround.

In addition to the new cars the game is seeing a host of gameplay tweaks as well, including changes in the time trial penalty system, rebalanced competitor AI and increased winnings (making those fancy new cars affordable a bit sooner). In addition, drift trial races now feature a rolling start, so enjoy. There is a downside though, as all previous leaderboards and rankings have been reset in light of the update. So if you spent the past few months clawing your way to the top of the charts then get ready to do it all over again.

From the sounds of things, the GT team has taken a page out of the Burnout Paradise playbook and decided to offer a pretty hefty free update in order to entice players to jump back in for another round of racing. Could we be seeing the start of a new trend? I sure hope so, and I also hope it doesn’t stay confined to racing games, but rather branches out to all genres.