The gamers that launched a motorsport revolution

"It was in that garage over there," Darren Cox, Nissan PlayStation GT Academy creator, says pointing at one of the many outbuildings that are dotted around Bedford Aerodrome.

He's talking about the moment, 13 years ago, that inspired the creation of the GT Academy, the first concerted effort to make the link between playing racing computer games and driving real cars on real tracks.

"We were launching a special version of the Nissan 350Z," he recalls. "In Japan, they were calling it the 30th Anniversary, and I thought that was a stupid name. I was running sportscars in the UK at the time, [publishing house] Haymarket put us together with Sony UK, because they were releasing Gran Turismo 4, so we called the car GT4. And part of the promotion was that we would see if you could beat Kazanori Yamauchi's [creator of the Gran Turismo game] time.

"Then we invited 20 random UK gamers to come here and the best guy won car number one of 176. There were a couple of kids who were really good on the game, and Charlie Butler-Henderson [then an instructor at Bedford] said 'a couple of these boys can really pedal', so I went and had a look at the times they were doing in the Z and the times they were doing on Gran Turismo and the guys at the top of the leaderboard were the same."

While a grassroots movement of sim racers had long been underway, creating local networks and modding the Grand Prix Legends game, the notion of using sims as a substitute - or even to augment - track running was a dark art. McLaren was rumoured to be deploying it, but few others. But given that Concorde pilots had long been using high-spec flight simulators in lieu of actual flying time, the potential crossover was clear, if not instantly apparent.

"I can remember an email from the then NISMO president saying 'just because someone is good at Tiger Woods Golf, doesn't mean they'll win a PGA tournament'," says Cox. "But we know there is a correlation between pushing the pedals and knowing the racing line, and being a good racing driver.

"It took us three years. It was supposed to be a one-off, just to see if we could find a good racing driver. We literally had a Health and Safety [Executive] guy on site full-time. We were insured up to the gunwales - this was two big Japanese companies doing something no one had ever done before. The risk factor was massive."

"We know there is a correlation between pushing the pedals and knowing the racing line, and being a good racing driver" Darren Cox

A Spaniard by the name of Lucas Ordonez won the inaugural GT Academy competition in 2008. His prize was an entry into the Dubai 24 Hours the following year, where he was a team-mate to Johnny Herbert. But he went so well, that Cox found the money to enter him in more races and ultimately that delivered two class podiums in the Le Mans 24 Hours and a GT300 race win in the highly-competitive Super GT series.

But he wasn't the only driver that was 'discovered' in the first Academy class.

"The first year we found two kids," says Cox. "Lucas Ordonez and Lars Schloemer (pictured above). Lars was a Berlin taxi driver. He was great, but we put them on the fitness regime and he put on weight! Suddenly he had the high life. He was living in the UK, had some money and had nothing to do apart from being a professional racing driver. Lucas was committed to doing this, but Schloemer didn't make it."

After a year away, the Academy returned and then found its most-high profile graduate, Jann Mardenborough in 2011. It was getting mainstream media coverage and expanded into a global brand. The winners were getting a chance of a lifetime, and while not all of them ended up as factory drivers, as Mardenborough (pictured below) and Wolfgang Reip did, they did go on to find jobs in the industry as tyre development drivers or track instructors - roles that only existed in their wildest dreams beforehand.

"At one point we had 38 countries in it, 85 million people watching the TV show, we were on RTL1 ahead of F1 qualifying," adds Cox.

In total, 23 drivers made it through the GT Academy. Cox left Nissan in 2015 and the concept fizzled out. But inspired by what he had seen, he created a new 'virtual' racing driver contest, The World's Fastest Gamer.

The idea of this was to take players from across the wide and diffuse world of racing gaming. While the Academy was limited to Sony's PlayStation, The World's Fastest Gamer took players from the hardcore world of sim racing - with their perfectly honed rigs - mobile gamers, of which there are hundreds of millions spread across the globe, and the console acolytes who fall somewhere in between the two.

The inclusion of mobile gamers might sound incongruous. But while mobile games are the least involved and realistic, the size and diversity of the audience means that it could have a potentially enormous impact in helping to create the motorsport fans of the future.

"We aren't connecting with the younger guys," says Cox. "We have a gap in our fanbase. I said from the beginning - of course GT Academy was about finding racing drivers, that was top of the pyramid - but it was also about making more fans of our sport.

"Gaming is the perfect space to make more fans in the sport. The stat I always quote is that 78% of the people we interviewed for GT Academy were fans of motorsport through gaming and not the other way around. What we have to do is make that link between being fans of gaming and being fans of the sport, but we shouldn't try to make them be fans like we were - standing on a bank at Brands Hatch in all weathers. We can't expect them to engage with our sport in the way that we did.

"I was at Le Mans two years ago with the man in charge of Real Racing 3. They'd done a Le Mans promotion and they had three million people playing that game at that moment. There were more people gaming around Le Mans than there were at Le Mans. So, if you can link those two things up... If there's an alert that says there's been a safety car because someone's gone off, 'watch what's happened here', you can stop the game and watch the replay of what's happened."

The world of eSports has exploded over the past few years, with titles such as Dota 2, Counter-Strike and League of Legends offering prize funds in the tens and even hundreds of millions. Motorsport has had a presence pretty much since the beginning, but at a much lower level. Champions of rFactor, iRacing or Assetto Corsa were more likely to make £10,000 rather than £10,000,000.

"At the moment, gaming companies pay car companies to have their cars in the game, but this is going to turn around at some point" Darren Cox

Formula E began the process of the changing this with its million-dollar eRace in Las Vegas - and recently announced a 'ghost racing' app allowing gamers to 'race' the real-life FE drivers in real time - while Formula 1's entry into the space last year has boosted its profile considerably.

But racing titles are still niche within the gaming world, and interestingly, within the biggest racing franchise - Forza - it's the open world Horizon series that is now the main seller.

Much like motorsport itself, and the proliferation of different series, categories and clubs, so there is a wide array of racing titles to play. The allure of F1 has pulled in many PC-based sim racers onto consoles, but excelling at this requires the time and dedication of a professional. Three or four hours of practice a day is beyond most people's capacity, so finding a way of appealing to the casual player is also critical.

"In the UK, if you drive for half an hour, you'll find a go kart track," says Cox. "You can't do that in India. If you want to go mass and you want to go global, you have to go mobile. Then you have to work on how to get those people to the track.

"Linear rights, digital rights and gaming rights are all going to merge. At the moment, gaming companies pay car companies to have their cars in the game, but this is going to turn around at some point because gaming companies have millions of downloads or copies sold, hundreds of millions of downloads on mobile and suddenly it's a marketing platform. You see manufacturers scrabbling to get their car on the cover.

"But there are also dangers. I was watching the Twitch feed of the F1 eSports qualifying and if you were a brand, you would not want to be associated with the comments in there, so that has to be taken into account."

Cox's latest venture is Gear Club Experience. This takes a mobile racing game and runs regional competitions that reward the best players with a real-life experience. For the inaugural UK round, the prize was a test in an F1 Williams.

Something of this scale clearly won't be possible in every territory, but rewarding the best virtual players with a physical experience is an important consideration. It's the beginning of the process of creating a tangible link between playing something on your phone and experiencing the sights, sounds and thrill of seeing or driving, a high-performance car in real life.

"It's a fun experience, you have to mix the virtual and the real, but not just for the guys who are at the top of the tree," says Cox. "This is about fans of racing and cars experiencing it in the real world. This is not an attempt to give someone a life in motorsport, it doing something we know is an amazing experience to open their horizons."