The best sports games like Gran Turismo are Gran Turismo 7, Forza Motorsport and Assetto Corsa Competizione. Below are 5, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to sports costs you.
Filtering to sports means you want the shape of a real game without necessarily wanting the rulebook. Most of the memorable ones throw the rules out entirely.
What you get: Something anybody can join. Arcade sports games are the easiest genre to hand to someone who does not play games.
What made Gran Turismo worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the sports part of that answer, and only the sports part.
The modern entry, and the cafe progression finally gives the collection a spine again.
The other simulation series, built around the race weekend rather than the collection.
If the driving model is what you care about and nothing else.
Simulation with the widest range of surfaces and weather.
Surface-change handling that GT never attempted, from the arcade.
Depth, in the arcade ones, and accessibility in the simulations. Very few sports games manage both.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Gran Turismo that are not sports games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Gran Turismo — 12 picks, no genre filter.
Gran Turismo 7. The modern entry, and the cafe progression finally gives the collection a spine again.
No. Gran Turismo released on the PlayStation, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
For the arcade picks, no — they do not use the real rules anyway. For the simulations, it helps a lot.
Usually not. The on-pitch changes between years are small and last year's version is a fraction of the price, unless you play the online team modes where the population moves across.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Gran Turismo list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is sports — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the sports guide for where to start in the genre generally.