Jann Mardenborough, a 22-year-old from Cardiff, is a leading light of the new
generation of gamer-drivers. He was discovered through the GT Academy in
2011 and is now competing in the GP3 series, an indirect feeder to Formula
One. Last month, Mardenborough was signed to the Red Bull junior driver team
development programme.
Unlike almost all of the drivers he now races against, Mardenborough has
minimal background in karting (he went to his local track a few times before
it closed when he was 10), instead getting a feel for the sport through his
PlayStation console.
“I’d spent three weeks doing a Motorsport Engineering BA at Swansea, but I
dropped out because I realised it was never going to be me driving the
cars,” he explains over a call from Florida, where he is to compete in the 12
Hours of Sebring endurance race. “Most of my friends were off in
Australia or wherever on a gap year and I was at home doing nothing.
“I went onto the Gran Turismo site and saw that they were having this
competition, so I entered.”
Mardenborough spent weeks practicing virtual time trials and, when the
competition closed, was delighted to find that out of more than 90,000
competitors he had finished in the top 24 in the UK – meaning he would be
going down to the national finals for fitness tests, media training and some
real-life driving. He excelled at those, too, and was taken to the European
finals, where contestants were whittled down over 12 days until only
Mardenborough remained.
“The first time I drove a sports car for real was at the national finals, it
was a Nissan 370z,” he says. “The way I controlled the car in the
game wasn’t that different to the way I controlled it in real life; it’s
uncanny how similar the handling was.
“For me the biggest difference was that before I’d been doing it all on a
14-inch TV screen, whereas now I had to be looking into the corners to see
what was coming up. It took a little while to train my brain to do that.”
Lewis Hamilton learned his trade on the kart track’s of Hertfordshire.
Photo: PHILIP BROWN
Laurence Wiltshire, director of the GT Academy, says the young Brit –
who still lives with his parents but is planning to move to be closer to
Silverstone this year – is an example of how the sport is being
democratised.
“Something like the Academy is a way of casting the net a bit wider in the
search for talent,” he says. And its reach is getting ever greater, with
plans to expand the franchise from Europe, Russia and the US to Thailand,
India, Australia and the Middle East. “There are hundreds of thousands of
people applying to do this in the UK, compared to maybe 1,000 people who get
a racing licence every year.
“Some of the people we welcome to the Academy didn’t even have a driving
licence before they had to get one to compete with us.”
Wiltshire adds: “The guys who are driving [in Formula One] now are incredibly
good, but they’ve also been incredibly privileged. Finding people through
gaming lets us move on from that. And because you can go round a virtual
track any number of times – it’s not closed at the evening or weekends – it
means these gamers in a sense have more experience than the people who have
done it the traditional way.”
Even those in the sport who were originally cynical about console games as an
introduction to real racing are beginning to come round.
Former Formula One driver Johnny Herbert highlights the fact that no game or
simulation, however realistic, can give potential competitors a sense of the
G-Force and fear factor they will feel on the track, or the experience of
moving with the car. And then there’s peripheral vision, which is a key tool
for real life drivers that isn’t engaged by a small TV screen in a back
bedroom. However, he admits drivers like Mardenborough and Spaniard Lucas
Ordoñez, also discovered through the GT Academy, have adapted quickly to the
demands of real-life racing.
“Simulations have just come on so far in recent years,” he says from
Melbourne, where he has been sent as an analyst for Sky Sports F1, which
holds exclusive broadcasting rights to the Grand Prix. “It’s all becoming so
real. But coming up through the gaming route still isn’t proven; you’re much
more likely to make it in Formula One if you did karting and worked your way
up. There’s been a steep progression so far but we don’t know how long
that’s going to continue to grow.”
Mardenborough, though, is confident his rise will continue, shrugging off the
idea he is under pressure to prove an alternative route to Formula One is
possible. “Formula One is the pinnacle of my sport so that’s absolutely what
I’m aiming for,” he says.