You don't drop a novice into the middle of the 24-hour race in your Nissan 350Z race car. At 3 a.m., 13 hours into the race, with 80-odd racers piling round the track, overtaking, undertaking, three abreast, this is a dangerous place to be. There's no reset button here, no second chance. One slip, one lapse in concentration, and it's not only your own car that'll be reduced to splintered, pointy pieces, but potentially a million bucks worth of other people's metal, too. Not to mention the drivers. So why the hell is 23-year-old Lucas Ordoñez, an easygoing MBA student from Spain who'd never driven a race car until six months ago, behind the wheel of this 350Z in the middle of this nighttime scrum? And how the hell is he nailing lap after lap within a couple of tenths of his teammate, former F1 ace Johnny Herbert?
Rewind a year or so. It's a debate most of us have had down at the pub: If you're quick on the PlayStation, will you be quick in real life? Darren Cox, Nissan's online guru, and Kazunori Yamauchi, creator of the Gran Turismo series, think so. In fact, they decided to prove that a virtual racing champion can be turned into a real-life racing champion. And so begins the most expansive, most extreme virtual/reality racing experiment in history. A quest to put a top gamer into a top-level international GT race. A real one.
The first bit — assembling the fastest gamers in Europe — is easy. PlayStation sets up an online competition for Gran Turismo 5 prologue racers, gets online gamers to race a specific course, car and setup, then invites the quickest 20 from each country to a national final to duke it out on the PlayStation. Top Gear drops into the British finals and we're blown away by the gamers' speed and consistency: virtual perfection, lap after lap. The top three edge out the rest of the competition by a few thousandths of a second. They're onto stage two: the Academy.
So to Silverstone, AT 5:30 a.m. on a still, autumnal Wednesday morning. Twenty-two avid gamers, including Lucas and our three plucky Brits, are pounding round the tarmac. On foot. No cars, definitely no consoles. Just trainers, T-shirts and an alarming volume of sweat. They're a surprisingly homogenous bunch, these gamers from across Europe. Twentysomething and white male. No girls. Disappointingly for the mildly masochistic among us, there's no 420-pound lardbucket, though the majority exhibit a translucent pallor hinting at too many hours locked indoors. There's none of the leanness of a Lewis Hamilton here, but, as Darren Cox reflects, it could have been worse. "We could have had a bunch of 50-year-olds with high blood pressure and beer guts," he says. "At least we've got something to work with here."
Good thing, too. The early-morning run is just the start of a brutal boot camp aiming to whip the armchair gamers into shape. Next up there's a scrambling, muddy assault course with nets and bogs and fences to negotiate. Then a bleep test and more fitness trials. Then mock press conferences, written examinations, interviews with sports psychologists. "We're trying to find a complete package here," says Darren Cox. "Endurance racing isn't just about driving quickly. It's about fitness, about teamwork and about your mental attitude. We've got to make sure they can do the whole lot."
Slowly, surely, throughout the week, they get whittled down. The short-sighted, the unfit, the weak, they all depart. Lucas is still there, but he's suffering. This isn't virtual any more. This is tough. Give them their due, the gamers are sticking it out. It's proof that they're not just bedroom racers. They want to win, they want to get to Dubai. Chatting with them, the same theme emerges: They're here because they always wanted to be racing drivers, and this is their best chance of getting there. Their only chance.
"We know that, somewhere out there, there are guys as quick as Kimi and Lewis and Felipe," says Darren. "But if they haven't been karting since the age of six, or had the right backing, they'll never be found. We're trying to find them." Ten contestants are sent home before the real-life racing even begins. It's been worth the effort for the survivors. They're chucked into GT-Rs, 350Zs, Caterhams, open-cockpit single-seaters, in drift challenges, pursuit races, hot laps. More whittling, as the gamers who can't get to grips with race clutches, with downforce, with slick tires, depart the competition. By the time we're down to six, the race pace is unfathomably high. For a bunch of guys with no track experience, their ability to get straight onto it, in an unfamiliar car on an unfamiliar circuit, is staggering.
Eventually there are just two: the fastest, most consistent of the bunch. Lucas, our Spanish MBA student, and 28-year-old Lars Schlömer, a German taxi driver, are crowned champions. The champagne-soaked celebrations are short-lived. In the four months before the Dubai race, they've got to acquire their international race licenses, which means competing in at least 15 national accredited races for Nissan.
Fast-forward again, to 2009. Lucas Ordoñez has just crossed the finish line of the Dubai 24 hours in the 350Z. Unfortunately for the headline grabbers, it's a resolutely midtable finish – ninth in class, 45th overall – but through no fault of Lucas or the other drivers: The Z suffered repeated mechanical failures in the first half of the race and spent a total of almost five and a half hours in the pits, some four hours more than most of its competitors.
Equally unfortunately, Lars isn't part of the driving team, having missed one of the qualifying races with illness. Lucas, though, has managed to put in a full quota of nearly six hours of driving, including a hefty night stint where he slapped down a series of ultraconsistent, ultraquick laps without hitting anyone or getting hit. "Lucas was fast, consistent and professional, everything we need," says Darren. Of course, the Nissan guys are always going to say that the boy's done brilliant, but there's the palpable sense that Lucas has exceeded expectations, that they've discovered a proper racer. "Even in my wildest dreams, I didn't think we were going to unearth the talent we unearthed," says Darren. He means it.
Does this prove that you can turn a top virtual racer into a top real-life racer? Critics might argue that, through such intensive training, anyone with a reasonable level of coordination and interest in cars could post times within a couple of tenths of the pros — that it's the couple of tenths beyond which separate the good from the great. Maybe so. But watching Lucas behind the wheel, his control, his ability to pick lines and braking points, there's more than just a decent driver here.
"I'm the happiest man in the world," Lucas tells Top Gear after the race. "Drivers here told me that I achieved in six months what thousands of drivers don't achieve in 15 years. Gran Turismo gave me a lot of experience to be consistent in my laps, to know the perfect line and give me references for every braking point."
Kazunori Yamauchi is in Dubai, watching Lucas cross the finish line. He is impressed. "I always believed that someone good at GT could drive as fast as a professional," he says. "In fact, I think that they could go even faster."
Sounds like a challenge for anyone thinking of having a shot at the GT Academy this year, a competition Darren promises will be even bigger. Get involved. Settle that pub debate for good.
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