Today, publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment and developer Polyphony Digital announced their plans to host a closed beta for Grand Turismo Sport that will start on March 17th, and only be available to a select amount of U.S. PlayStation Network IDs.

In the closed beta, participants will be able to choose from a select rotation of cars and tracks each day to race online against others. During the beta phase, track and car selections will vary, and there will be a mix of race categories and course configurations.

The closed beta will also offer up the first time that users will be able to see how the Driver Profile is integrated within the game.

Over on the PlayStation Blog, Kazunori Yamauchi Founder of Polyphony Digital, Creator of Gran Turismo adds the following:

The introduction of Sportsmanship Rating (tracks a player’s behavior and manners on-track) and Driver Rating (represents the overall speed of the player and how well they perform in races) will ensure those that race online will be equally matched, naturally creating a balanced group of competitive drivers for every race.

The initial phase of the closed beta, as mentioned above will begin on March 17th. Invites will be dished out via Message on your PS4 dashboard. Currently, there is no announced end date for the beta.

According to Kazunori Yamauchi, in order for the development team to capture data in an optimal manner, the sample size will need to be increased gradually and in stages. What this sounds like is that the team is planning to add more testers as the beta progresses.

Yamauchi-san continued that saying the first phase of the beta is limited to the U.S. because the time differences best matched to the development team in Tokyo. European players will be let in during the second phase.

During the initial phase of the beta, servers will be open for users during specific times across the day. These times will be shared closer to the Beta launch across the developer's social channels.

If you're in North America, you can sign up here, if you're in Europe, you can put your name (actually, your PSN Id) in here for the second phase.

Gran Turismo Sport is slated to release exclusively on the PS4 sometime in 2017. Below, you can check out the newly released closed beta trailer: