Grotti Cheetah

The white wedge parked nose-in on Ocean Drive in Trailer 1 is the Grotti Cheetah. Rockstar's own media page shows the same rear end, and the badge in the middle of the tail panel settles it.

The camera at 0:32.57 is low and behind the car, so what fills the crop is the rear deck. A broad black louvred panel covers the engine bay, its slats running across the car, and the bodywork rises to meet it on both sides. Below that sits a full-width dark grille panel, and at the outer edge of it a cluster of three round lamps a side in red. The paint is white and the proportions are the flat wedge of an eighties mid-engine car rather than anything modern.

In the middle of that black panel, small and dark against the mesh, is a rearing horse. That is the Grotti badge, and it is the piece that turns a shape into a name: Rockstar's own media page carries four studio shots of the Cheetah, and the rear one puts the same horse in the same place, with Cheetah in script on the white body just outboard of the lamps, and the same louvred deck above. The car in the trailer wears plain white; the one in the studio shots wears the Ultimate Edition's red-and-black stripe over the flank and a red interior. The livery differs, the bodywork does not.

Everything behind it is Ocean Drive at night. People are standing in the road: a woman in a white top and red skirt, a figure in a patterned green dress, a man in a yellow shirt and red cap. Headlights are on, a pale car is stopped further back, and a cyan sports car sits in the immediate foreground with its own page in this database.

How to recognise it

• Grotti's rearing horse, centred on the black rear panel
• Black louvred engine cover across the rear deck
• Three round tail lamps a side, in red
• Full-width dark grille panel below the engine cover
• Flat wedge profile, white paint, no stripe in the trailer car
• Parked nose-in on Ocean Drive at night, crowd in the road behind

The frame it comes from

The frame is Trailer 1 at 0:32.57. It is 1920 by 1080, and the vehicle occupies 422 by 270 of it. Also in it: Ocean Drive at night and a cyan sports car.

What we still do not know

• The donor car. The cues are the mid-engine Italian wedge of the mid-eighties: side strakes, a louvred deck, triple round lamps. We are not narrowing it further from one rear view.
• Whether the plain white car in the trailer is the base model and the striped car a paid variant, or whether both are liveries on one vehicle
• Whether the car is drivable in the trailer scene or set dressing for the street
• Everything measured: top speed, acceleration, handling, price, where it spawns

A note on this record

The name comes from Rockstar, not from us: the studio shots on rockstargames.com/VI/media are filed as ULTIMATE_EDITION_GROTTI_CHEETAH. We matched the trailer car to those shots on the badge, the lamp cluster, the grille panel and the louvred deck.