The next time you're about to scold your kid—or spouse—for spending too much time playing videogames instead of enjoying the sunny weather, consider this: They could be preparing for a career in motorsports. That's a possibility Nissan and Sony have created with their "GT Academy," a worldwide contest to find skilled racing gamers and make them into skilled racing drivers, then send them to the big leagues.
Becoming a professional athlete is hard. Aside from receiving a healthy dose of God-given talent, aspiring athletes need to put in huge amounts of practice, then be discovered by someone in a position to get them to the big leagues.
In sports like baseball, football, and basketball, the practice part is pretty easy. Find an open field and pick up the relatively inexpensive equipment, or join a local team. The talented rise to the top, gain attention, and can make their way to the major leagues with million-dollar paychecks.
Motorsports isn't like that. There aren't youth leagues kids can join for a few bucks. No varsity driving teams for motivated high schoolers. Most towns don't have a local circuit, and if they do, getting track time isn't like hopping on a basketball court.
By the time an aspiring race car driver reaches a top-tier racing league, where they might get paid (drivers in lower leagues sometimes pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a spot on the team), they might have put in more than a million dollars—or even more. Some F1 drivers (or their sponsors) actually pay teams to race for them, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, this means that it's likely the most talented drivers out there, the ones born with the talent and ability, might never find themselves behind the wheel of a race car.
That's why Nissan and Sony partnered up in 2008 to create GT Academy. It's one part publicity-generating contest, one part top-to-bottom racing academy.
In GT Academy, players of the popular PlayStation franchise Gran Turismo can drive a virtual Nissan 370Z around a track, looking to set the best time.
The top competitors (the number varies by year) get an in-person tryout, and the winner gets a paid sponsorship to race with Nissan, in real leagues. In real cars. Where the newly minted drivers go first depends on their skill level and where they'll best develop. They mostly stay local—Americans race in America, Europeans race in Europe, etc. All of the 16 winners selected in the past seven years are still racing, a testament to the program's success.
"I always wanted to race. It's all I ever really wanted to do," says Bryan Heitkotter, the 2011 champion from the United States. "But I didn't have the traditional opportunities [to get into racing]. By my late 20s, I started to think that the dream was never going to happen."
Heitkotter had always played videogames, spending countless hours in front of Gran Turismo on his PlayStation, complete with a racing wheel, pedals and seat. Unlike playing the Madden or FIFA sports videogames, which can help you learn football or soccer strategy but has very little in common with the physicality of the actual sports, racing in a videogame with a wheel and pedals is surprisingly realistic. Videogame racers still have to manage the driving line, trail braking and accelerating through corners, and driving and passing in a pack of cars. They still have to know the track.
All that's missing are G-forces and a loud and hot car.
"You have the visuals, the feedback through the steering wheel," says Heitkotter. "You develop muscle memory for oversteer and understeer. Learn the racing line, how to pass and how to defend."
It's up for debate whether driving videogames can create talent, but it certainly can develop existing talent and then help it get discovered through a totally non-traditional path.
"Just because these guys don't have those opportunities doesn't mean they don't deserve it," says Darren Turner, who drives for Aston Martin Racing in the World Endurance Championship. "Motorsport is expensive to get started in. [GT Academy is] great. It's an opportunity for these guys to find a way in."
"They learned to drive using PlayStation and learned all the basic techniques—the same things the kid in the go-kart has to learn. They just get there in a different way."
Heitkotter says one of the biggest things he learned in his living room was the mental aspect of driving. He took his Gran Turismo racing seriously, especially on longer races (some "endurance" events can go for several hours). "Going from gaming to the real car, you have that concentration right away."
Since 2008, GT Academy has graduated 19 drivers. This year alone, nearly 300,000 gamers entered the contest, including 43,870 from the US. From that huge pool, just three champions were crowned from three different regions (Europe, Asia, and International).
To win, drivers need more than talent. They're paid representatives of their teams and their sponsors, and they need to be able to talk to the press and to fans like any other professional athlete would.
In addition to videogame and on-track racing challenges, finalists go through a public relations challenge to see how well they can talk with (potentially hostile!) reporters. There are physical competitions, too, since racers need to be in excellent shape. Driving a car for hours on-end is physically taxing thanks to G-forces, hot conditions, and being strapped in to a seat so tightly that you can't move.
But, if they can make it through the gauntlet of challenges, it's the opportunity of a lifetime. And for Nissan, the sheer number of people applying means it'll find more talent than it does through traditional means, simply because it's looking at so many people, including those not lucky enough to be born rich.
"Who's the best driver that's ever lived? Perhaps Senna or Fangio or Schumacher," says Paul Gerrard, a professional racing driver and instructor. "But, if you look at them, they all had a very privileged upbringing to get them to that level." It's more likely that the greatest driver of all time, or even alive today, is someone who simply never had the opportunity to race.
"It's awesome for racing. When you have something like GT Academy, it's 'We'll take you. Rich or poor, we don't care,'" said Gerrard. "It takes out some of the unfortunate built-in elitism for motorsport—no one ever put there and decided to be elite, but it's just expensive."
Heitkotter calls it "a back door into motorsports. Kind of a shortcut." This year, Heitkotter won his class several times, and finished on the podium this month at a Pirelli World Challenge race in Utah. He was just promoted to the GT-Pro class. Naturally, he's driving a Nissan, the GT-R Nismo GT3 car.
Other grads have gone further. Three of them, Lucas Ordóñez of Spain (the first GT Academy champion), Jann Mardenborough of Great Britain (2011), and Mark Shulzhitsky of Russia (2012), raced for Nissan at the 24 Hours of Le Mans this year in the wacky, top-tier LMP1 class.
Between racing for real and mentoring GT Academy hopefuls every year, Heitkotter doesn't play much Gran Turismo. "I don't have the time anymore," he says. "One of the main reasons I played my whole life was to play a racing driver. It was my only way to race. My escape. My way to be a racing driver."
He'll just have to settle for the real thing.
