Sports:Mardenborough Grows From Gamer To Formula One Racer

Jann Mardenborough is one of the hottest young talents in European motor racing. The 23-year-old Brit is a race winner in the formula one-supporting GP3 series – the same category that launched Valtteri Bottas and Daniil Kvyat to F1 stardom. Yet four years ago he'd never sat in a racing car or even raced a go-kart. The only racing he'd done was on computer games. If you think computer games are for kids to waste time on, you're wrong. A partnership between Nissan and Playstation's Gran Turismo game, dubbed GT Academy, has been turning gamers into real-life racers for the past seven years. The idea is simple: find the best gamers in an online contest; take fastest to a racetrack to put them to the test in real cars; pick a winner and put him in a real race. The first winner, in 2008, was Spaniard Lucas Ordonez who has gone on to make a successful career for himself racing Nissan's sports cars. His list of achievements already include two podium finishes at the Le Mans 24-hour race in a prototype car and a promising test in a V8 Supercar. But it is Mardenborough who has emerged as the real star of the project thanks to his potential to push the boundaries of what the program can achieve. A successful sports-car racing career with Nissan's various projects – which in 2015 will include an outright assault on the Le Mans 24 hours with an LMP1 racer against Audi and Porsche – is the easy option, but his age coupled with his success in GP3 has people asking if he could make it all the way to formula one instead. Nissan, which backs his racing, originally placed him in the European formula three series in 2013 to try to speed up his learning curve for prototype sports-car racing (Nissan runs cars in the second-tier LMP2 category that are similar to formula cars). But he has exceeded expectations with his natural talent. He was promoted to the GP3 series to drive with the Arden team, owned by Red Bull Racing team boss Christian Horner, and signed up by the reigning F1 champions to a development program. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/sport/motorsport/jann-mardenborough-has-the-right-stuff-to-go-from-gamer-to-formula-one-racer-20140918-10inrk.html#ixzz3Dlep3PlB