Ghirapur Grand Prix

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Ghirapur Grand Prix
Event Information
Era	Omenpath Era
Location	Avishkar Alacria Amonkhet Gastal Kylem Muraganda
Characters	Chandra Nalaar Spitfire Pia Nalaar Zahur Basri Ket Kolodin Mendicant Core Speed Demon Winter Redshift Daretti Caradora Lagorin Aatchik Howler Kari Zev Far Fortune
Outcome	1st: Cloudspire Racing Team victory 2nd: Champions of Amonkhet victory

Not to be confused with Grand Prix.

The Ghirapur Grand Prix (GGP) is a death-defying interplanar circuit race and the Multiverse's premier combat sporting event. Originally an illegal street racing event confined to Avishkar, after the opening of the Omenpaths the race was taken interplanar. The second interplanar GGP, across Avishkar, Amonkhet and Muraganda, was the focus of Aetherdrift. The race started and ended in Ghirapur, from where it also was broadcast.

Description

The Ghirapur Grand Prix takes place yearly by Avishkar's calendars over a week, beginning at nightfall in the heart of Ghirapur as a nod to the Ghirapur Sprint's night-time beginnings. Preparation takes months and requires a colossal administrative effort, combining the work of multiple teams (diplomatic, development, broadcast, and security) across several planes to create a seamless festival atmosphere for its viewers and a coherent course for its participants.

The grand prize of the Ghirapur Grand Prix changes every year, sourced from the vast pool of long-hidden artifacts and treasures once withheld by the old Consulate. Checkpoints established by the race record what teams cross through them, ensuring that cheating is, on paper, impossible. The victor is determined in the simplest, most straightforward way: the first team to cross the finish line wins. This might lead to activity where people sabotage one another, as winning is as much about removing the competition as being the fastest.

Circuits

It is important to note that the Ghirapur Grand Prix is a festival of multiple races. The colossal undertaking of the Grand Prix employs thousands of staff members, engineers, and marshals in an interplanar endeavor unrivaled in the Multiverse. The omencasted event that the fans across Avishkar gather to watch is called the Grand Prix. Multiple lower-division races follow the ceremonial departure of the Grand Prix on Avishkar, ranging from single-day sprints up to full-distance races. Save for the exhibition category, all racers stand to win promotion into the category immediately above them. The events are as follows, ranked in order of prestige from most to least:

1. The Grand Prix proper
2. GP Aspire, a qualifier for the following year's Grand Prix. GP Aspire typically collects 20 teams from around the Multiverse to compete for entries into the next year's Grand Prix. Most of these teams have won their entry to GP Aspire through competition in regional sanctioned races, others are invited or have won lottery entry via contests or bring unique sponsorships to Avishkar that allow them entry.
3. Top Division
4. Class 1
5. Class 2
6. Class 3
7. Exhibition races

History

Ghirapur Sprint

The Grand Prix started decades before New Phyrexia's Invasion of the Multiverse as the Ghirapur Sprint, an illicit street race adjacent to the Inventors' Fair. It was held at night annually by the New Culture Collective, a countercultural movement from Ghirapur. Though the Sprint wasn't the only race the NCC organized, it was its largest, most popular, and most dangerous. The Consulate spent great resources attempting to shut down the race and imprison the NCC's leaders and were successful for some years. When the NCC became a major political party after Avishkar's Indigo Revolution, the race was proposed as a tool of soft power, showcasing Avishkar's culture and spreading its influence to the citizens of the many planes it had become connected to by Omenpaths. The Grand Prix is managed by an independent governing body overseen by the new night minister of Ghirapur, Gonti.

Grand Prix

The inaugural Grand Prix was also the first multiplanar race. It was very chaotic, crossing nearly two dozen planes through both stable and unstable omenpaths and with a mass of teams participating, some of whom were killed or lost. Among the planes raced through were Alacria, Amonkhet, Avishkar, Gastal, Kylem, and the homeplanes of the Guidelight Voyagers, the Goblin Rocketeers, the Keelhaulers, the Speed Demons, and the Speedbrood, all ten of which fielded teams in the subsequent Grand Prix. Kylem's team, the Cloudspire Racing Team, won this edition. The event was considered a success and another was planned for the next year.

Second Grand Prix

The Avishkar Assembly aimed to build on the successes of the inaugural GGP by extending the festivities out of Ghirapur and Avishkar, inviting teams and delegations from across the Multiverse to participate. They hoped that the GGP would become an annual Multiversal festival and showcase, displaying the wonders of post-invasion, post-Indigo Revolution Avishkar. The modern Grand Prix is a critically important demonstration of the new government's capability to manage interplanar logistics, administration, coordination, cultural wealth, and economic capacity. To that end, the governing body of the Ghirapur Grand Prix operates not just on Avishkar but across the Multiverse, sending delegates to linked planes to sanction and classify local versions of GGP-style stage races. These races and other sanctioned events across Avishkar feed participants into the Ghirapur Grand Prix.

The second interplanar Grand Prix, held around 4564 AR, had an increased scope and a more controlled course, which now took a limited group of racing teams across Amonkhet and Muraganda before returning them to the finish line on Avishkar. The Aetherspark, an artifact that contained a planeswalker's spark, was offered as the race's grand prize.

The built course on Amonkhet only progressed over the ruins and structures that the leaders of Naktamun had allowed them to use. Amonkhet allowed the remote stages of the race to cross the Broken Lands as well, as an opportunity to probe the unknown quarters of their plane. Advance teams from Avishkar were deployed to Muraganda a year before the beginning of the race and split into four divisions: diplomatic, construction, maintenance, and security. Though the Avishkari delegations were granted assurances by the Saurid Autocracy, a ruling power, that the land they built on was the proper place to do so, the race's security and maintenance teams since discovered that the treaties their counterparts in diplomacy had secured were not signed with the full knowledge of the land's other inhabitants. Official GGP hideouts are scattered throughout the track to provide cover for racers.

The first stage of the Grand Prix raced out of the heart of Ghirapur and into its rural edges. It then took racers through a stable Omenpath to Amonkhet, where they raced along the Luxa. An Omenpath at the end of that stage sent racers into the wilds of Muraganda, where they explored the canopies of this primordial plane from the safety of an elevated track. From perilous tracks suspended above coral pits and sky-scraping geysers to tight, forested corridors that punched through Muraganda's green walls of ancient jungle, the Muragandan stage of the Ghirapur Grand Prix was perhaps the most perilous that the racers experienced. Their progress was also hindered by attacks from giant dinosaur and Saurid raiders. From Muraganda, they returned to Amonkhet — this time to sprint across the boiling desert — and then back to the final stage in the heart of Ghirapur.

Despite environmental hazards and an unexpected dragonstorm, all of the teams made it to the final stage of the race. Before any could cross the finish line, however, a revanchist coup launched by former Consulate members impeded many of the racers. Leading racers from the Speed Demons, Aether Rangers, Keelhaulers, and Quickbeasts were caught up in the trap. Still more racers, including Mendicant Core, Redshift, Howler, Far Fortune, and Aatchik were mind controlled by Jace Beleren in an attempt to recover Loot, while he rendered Chandra and Pia Nalaar and Sita Varma unconscious. In the confusion, Zahur, captain of the Champions of Amonkhet, reached the finish line first, winning the Aetherspark for his team.

Teams and results

Inaugural Grand Prix

Color(s)	Team	Captain(s)	Plane	Placing
	Cloudspire Racing Team	Kolodin	Kylem	1st
	Guidelight Voyagers	Mendicant Core	Unknown	"Solidly middle-pack"

Second Grand Prix

Ten teams participated in the race:

Color(s)	Team	Captain(s)	Plane	First stage	Second stage	Final
	Aether Rangers	Spitfire, Pia Nalaar	Avishkar	2nd	Possibly 2nd
	Champions of Amonkhet	Zahur, Basri Ket	Amonkhet			1st
	Cloudspire Racing Team	Kolodin, Chandra Nalaar	Kylem	Possibly 3rd	Possibly 3rd
	Guidelight Voyagers	Mendicant Core	Unknown
	Speed Demons	Speed Demon, Winter	Duskmourn	1st
	Goblin Rocketeers	Redshift, Daretti	Unknown
	Alacrian Quickbeasts	Caradora, Lagorin	Alacria		Possibly 1st
	Speedbrood	Aatchik	Unknown
	Keelhaulers	Howler, Kari Zev	Unknown
	Endriders	Far Fortune	Gastal

In-game references

Associated cards:

• Air Response Unit
• Elvish Refueler
• Kickoff Celebrations
• Marshals' Pathcruiser
• Pit Automaton
• Racers' Scoreboard
• Roadside Assistance
• Skybox Ferry
• Scrap Compactor
• Starting Column
• Thopter Fabricator
• Ticket Tortoise
• Vnwxt, Verbose Host
• Wreck Remover

Referred to:

• Broadcast Rambler
• Chaos Warp (Aetherdrift Commander)
• Fang Guardian
• Maximum Overdrive
• Tyrox, Saurid Tyrant
• Wind-Scarred Crag (Aetherdrift)