"Gran Prix racing action, complete with the roar of supercharged engine, squealing of tires around curves and heart-stopping crash effects. Player drops in his quarter, hits the starter, grabs the wheel and-he's off! Four-speed gear shift (1,2,3,R) changes speed of the car on the screen and the sound of the engine. Foot pedals for gas and brake demand quick reactions around the road-race curves. Watch out for the oil slick! Your brakes lock momentarily and you skid. It takes lots and lots of pratice runs. At two bits a run."

Gran Trak 10 was one of the first video driving games, and the first to use ROM memory (to store graphics). It was also the first driving coin-op videogame with a steering wheel, gear shift, and gas and brake pedal controls.

Race against the clock as you drive through the checkpoints. Avoid the pylons as they will cause you to crash and watch out for oil slicks. The machine gives a rating at the end based on how far you were able to drive before time ran out.

There is also a 2 player version of this game called "Gran Trak 20", and a smaller version (compacter cabinet) called just "Trak 10", both released in 1974 too.

Gran Trak 10 is the same game as Atari's LeMans. The only difference between the two is the gear stick. Gran Trak 10 has a 3-speed with reverse while LeMans has a 4-speed.

Extract from "A Complete History of Breakout" article, by Marty "Retro Rogue" Goldberg:

"In 1974, in an effort to keep the rapid pace of development from stalling, Nolan Bushnel had struck up a partnership with two former Ampex associates, Steve Mayer and Larry Emmons. The two had left Ampex to start their own electronics think tank in Grass Valley, California called Cyan Engineering. Cyan quickly became advanced designers for Atari, "building the technical stuff that people said couldn't be built" according to Nolan. Their first project had been a racing game (the first such video game) which was called Gran Trak 10. Unfortunately, the game that that was designed by people who designed things that "couldn't be built", could not be built. Steering and other manufacturing problems had to be fixed by Alan Alcorn before it could be manufactured. The resulting 3 month stall of the release inflicted a half-million-dollar loss, as much as the company had made in '73. Bushnell cut the company back by almost half in an effort to recover."

Gran Trak 10 is the first game of a very long serie simulating a car race through a top-down view of the whole circuit. Members will include Sprint 2, Indy 500, Badlands, Nitro, Micro Machine, etc.