Sony’s European brand manager Penrose Tackie just made a lot of people’s days today by revealing the cover star of Gran Turismo 5 via the PlayStation Blog, complete with some luscious screenshots of the beast in question. Here in all its glory is the official cover of GranTurismo 5, featuring the Mercedes Benz SLS AMG gull-wing supercar. Tackie states in his blog post that the SLS, which will be officially launched at the Geneva Motorshow in March, has a 6.2litre V8 engine, enabling it to go from 0-60 in 3.8 seconds and to reach a top speed of almost 200mph. According to Tackie, the SLS AMG was the “natural choice” for the cover of Gran Turismo 5. And very, very nice it looks too! Go here to see behind-the-scenes footage of the collaboration between Mercedes-Benz and the Gran Turismo team, including Gran Turismo series producer Kazunori Yamauchi test driving the SLS AMG around the real-life Nurburgring.

SCEE and Polyphony Digital have today announced that a new GT5 demo for the PS3 will be available for download on the European PlayStation Network from 17th December. According to this post on the PlayStation.Blog from Penrose Tackie, Gran Turismo European brand manager, the demo is actually the GT Academy 2010 Time Trial competition, in which players get to drive the Nissan 370Z (tuned and non-tuned versions) on a new section of the Gran Turismo 5 circuit. The top 20 qualifiers from each country will get the chance to take part in a national final. The 20 winners of that final will then get to attend the actual GT Academy 2010. The two best drivers from the five-day GT Academy trial will then undergo specialized driver training to determine the overall winner. There will be no other opportunities to enter the GT Academy aside from the Time Trial completion. The closing date for the competition is 24th January 2010.

While the lack of a firm release date for GT5 is still a cause of frustration as we reported back at the beginning of October, Sony are at least keeping us all salivating with a steady stream of jaw-dropping screenshots. Today’s fresh batch features three G37 and five Audi TT screenshots. Not bad, are they?! Sony also recently released a ton of Toyota screenshots as well as some other miscellaneous shots that we thought you might like to see.

Gran Turismo 5 is set to feature over 950 cars and 20 locations with 70 different variations. There will be new physics, overturning of cars, moveable objects on the course and even Hybrid and electronic cars to drive. There will also be a feature enabling you to carry over cars unlocked in the Gran Turismo PSP game.

To access lots more information about the game, including a dedicated TV channel and a blog, you can also check out the official website.

Building one of the most impressive racing simulators of all time is just incredibly difficult, or the guys at Polyphony Digital are just messing with us, but for some reason, the release date of the very highly anticipated Gran Turismo 5 has once again been postponed. The rumoured release dates have varied from 2009, late December 2009, to December 29, and March 2010 Japan release.

Now comes word on the Amazon website that GT5 is going to be released on March 31, 2010. Frankly, we liked “late 2009″ a lot more, but it appears we have little say in the matter.

The constant delay could just be a heartless marketing campaign to keep GT5 in the news but five years on and an all-new gaming console is long enough to wait for the answer to GT4. So we’re saying, enough fooling around and release it already. How hard is that??