Racing Games: Training for the Track

As racing games become increasingly realistic, we ask if programmes like the Nissan GT Academy can enable the leap from virtual gaming to race track success

Feature by Jodi Mullen | 02 Feb 2015

Racing games have long been a showcase for the technical prowess of the hardware that runs them. From Nintendo’s Mario Kart series to Sony’s Gran Turismo and Drive Club and Microsoft’s Project Gotham Racing and Forza Motorsport, each console manufacturer has always used racers to convince gamers to splash out for new systems. Sony and Microsoft in particular have spent the last half decade locked in a battle to release the most authentic and visually stunning recreation of motor racing for their consoles – to the point where the games themselves are sophisticated enough to allow the most skilled virtual drivers to cross over into the real sport.

Sony’s Gran Turismo series has led the way in bringing gamers into the sport of motor racing, with series creator Kazunori Yamauchi even going on to a professional racing career himself. Since 2008, The Nissan GT Academy has provided a very real path for the most skilled virtual drivers to make the jump from screen to track. The Academy, a joint program between Nissan, Sony and developer Polyphony, recruits the best Gran Turismo players from around Europe and pits them against each other in a final held every year at Silverstone. The winner goes on to enter Nissan’s intensive driver development program, with seven of the competition’s annual victors going on to a career in professional racing.

Jann Mardenborough, from Wales, is one of the lucky few who graduated from GT Academy and has progressed to a successful career in motorsports. Since winning the competition in 2011, the 23-year old has secured a podium finish at Le Mans 24 Hours and more recently switched to Formula 3 racing, often regarded as a stepping stone for drivers who aspire to race in Formula 1. With real life experience of racing restricted to karting at an early age, Mardenborugh instead channelled his passion for cars into videogames where he honed his skills for more than a decade.

In the years since the first generation of GT Academy graduates started learning their craft on consoles and PCs, realistic racing games have become big business. Big names like Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport are multi-million selling franchises and system sellers while arcade racers have steadily slumped in popularity – see the demise of the WipEout and Ridge Racer series. Throughout this period, the simulators have aspired to greater verisimilitude, attempting to bring players closer to the experience of real racing.

Licensing deals, realistic physics engines, damage modelling, specialist racing peripherals and using real world telemetry to model handling have all contributed to more authentic in-game racing. Perhaps just as significantly, visual fidelity has improved greatly as technology advances, with footage of the forthcoming PC racer Project CARS bordering on photorealistic.  But even with recent strides in hardware, just how close can videogames come to matching the experience of driving a real car – and can a driver honed on simulators carry his skills over to the real thing?  

In November 2014, Formula Drift champion Michael Essa took part in a challenge to try and determine once and for all how virtual driving measures up against the real world experience. Essa got behind the wheel of a stock Nissan GT-R in Sony’s Gran Turismo 6 and took on the Willow Springs track before trying to beat his lap time using an actual GT-R at the real circuit in California. The result? Essa’s lap time on the simulator was a full 7 seconds ahead of his best performance on the Willow Springs asphalt.

In fact, similar attempts to pit videogame motoring against its real world equivalent – including a 2005 Top Gear episode that saw Jeremy Clarkson take to the Laguna Seca circuit in an attempt to beat his Gran Turismo 4 times – have consistently shown that drivers are able to set faster lap times in the electronic version. Technically impressive though they are, there’s still a limit to just how faithfully modern driving sims can recreate the real-world physics and weather systems that affect a car’s performance on the track. That’s to say nothing of more human factors: caution, adrenaline and fear. It’s one thing to risk braking late on a corner in Gran Turismo or Forza and quite another when the driver’s life is potentially at stake behind the wheel of a real vehicle.

None of which is to say that videogames aren’t a fantastic educational tool for the aspiring racing driver. Indeed many professional racing teams, like Jann Mardenborough’s current employer Red Bull, use simulators to help their drivers learn tracks they’ve never raced on before, to make sure they’re competitive as soon as they walk out on the tarmac. While most professional drivers still make their way to the top via the traditional route of working up through the racing tiers, the success of GT Academy’s graduates has shown that racing games offer a route into the sport for gamers with sufficient dedication and skill.