Winning a $1 Million Drive?

Despite being in lockdown, thousands are racing each other in the hope of securing a race seat worth $1,000,000. I’m one of them, and you can be too!

Now, when it comes to this journey of mine, my #RacingGrind, I’m realistically looking at an entry-level series to race in. After all, I don’t really know if I’ll be any good yet, so diving into an elite competition would be stupid, and that’s if I could afford it in the first place, which I can’t.

But what if I am good enough already? What if, somehow, I am just as quick as the professionals, if not quicker? What if I have all this talent, and yet it’s being wasted through a lack of opportunity? There must be some way, somehow, for me to prove this talent to someone, right?

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Luckily, there is! Better yet, I (or you for that matter) don’t need a full, top-of-the-range sim-rig that costs thousands of pounds. All I need is my smartphone.

Three years ago, Darren Cox – creator of the Nissan GT Academy competition – devised the World’s Fastest Gamer competition. The objective is simple: take the fastest virtual drivers from a selection of video games, fly them to America (in this instance Miami), and put them through a series of racing, fitness and personality tests. The prize for the winner of this competition? A season of professionally racing GT3 machinery in the GT World Challenge, a prize worth US$1 million!

Rudy Van Buren, winner of the inaugural World’s Fastest Gamer, is racing Porsche Supercup in 2020.

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So how does this relate to you or me, and our smartphones? Well, last week, qualifying for the third iteration of World’s Fastest Gamer began, using a free-to-play smartphone game called Gear.Club. In order to qualify, you must complete two time-trials in the Koenigsegg Agera RS, and have the fastest combined time at the end of the entry period. Easy, right?

All you have to do is complete the two time trials quicker than anyone else!

If you want to enter yourself, the competition opened on April 15^th, and runs until May 6^th, so you have just under 2 weeks to download the game and perfect your times. But what if you don’t win? No worries, as this isn’t your only chance to get to the WFG3 finals. 2 more qualifying events are set to take place on the platform in the next couple of months, so there’s plenty of time to practice!

The on-track competition takes place using custom WFG machinery.

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Now, I found out about this competition last Thursday, just as the entry period opened. Personally, I had never even heard of the game before, let alone played it, but it’s a dream of mine to go racing nonetheless. Therefore, I downloaded the app immediately and set to work getting my times in.

Initially, I found the handling mechanics quite difficult to get used to, as it felt quite arcade-y in comparison to Real Racing 3, a mobile game I have played on-and-off for years. Knowing that this is probably my only way in to professional racing, though, I have devoted a fair amount of my last week getting used to the game, in order to maximise my chances.

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The game’s graphics are, for a mobile game, reasonably high quality. The “circuits” used aren’t real tracks, but fabricated street tracks, meaning it’s quite difficult to work out braking points, as there aren’t many reference points. The car itself is also tricky to initially master, as it’s prone to oversteer, especially at higher speeds. The means that occasionally you end up fishtailing down a straight before lightly grazing one of the walls, which magically returns you to a solid 15 mph regardless of your entry velocity. All of this combined means it’s not the easiest game to master, but the game is quite satisfying when you complete a good run. So, how have my times stacked up against the rest of the world? Quite good considering, I think.

In order to be placed on the leaderboard, you have to have a time inside the top 500 in the world on both time-trials. Sounds quite difficult, but I actually managed to put myself in that situation at the end of my first day on the game! Better yet, at the end of Saturday (day 3 on the game), one of my times made the top 100! Safe to say it’s actually remarkably easy to get used to the way the game works, even if it is difficult to master, which I’m not remotely close to doing.

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It’s worth noting that, in order to keep the playing field fairly level, attempts at setting times are limited by a ticket system. You can have a maximum of 5 tickets at any one time, and it takes 2 hours for a ticket to replenish. Therefore, I have been getting 10 daily attempts in, in two sets of 5. You could of course obtain more attempts, but these come at a cost – ranging from 79p for 5 extra tickets, all the way up to £43.99 for 375 extra tickets. I’d expect you’re only buying these if you feel confident of clinching first place, though.

Naturally, as more competitors have entered, my times have slipped down the standings a little, and at the time of writing I’m 122^nd overall. A result I’d be happy with if the competition ended today, but that won’t stop me from striving for that top spot.

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“Why Me? Why This?”

Why have I decided to create this blog? What’s the aim? And why do I think my advice will be any better than anyone else’s?

Why do I think I’m in a suitable position to document how difficult (or otherwise) it is for a driver to work their way up the motorsport ladder? After all, I have no experience of being part of a paddock before, so I don’t have any experience I can pass onto you readers. Yet I speak about my previous racing experience, so I can’t be a complete novice, which is what I’m painting myself out to be? What exactly is my racing history, and why do I think that I’m an ideal testbed for other novices to maybe learn from in the future?

My first memories of driving go-karts are a little foggy, as they happened the best part of 10 years ago. Whilst I don’t remember setting the world alight with immediately blistering times, I do remember the elation that I felt after getting out of the kart. Those occasions were few and far between, however. Extremely few, in fact, as I can only think of three occasions between the ages of 9 and 11. That didn’t stop me from catching the bug, though, as I spent the next few years dreaming of excuses for my parents to take me to the track.

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I didn’t start regularly karting until about 5 years ago, then, when I was about 15. The Duke of Edinburgh award is fairly well known here in England, where it is basically a programme that aims to help prepare young people for adult life. When I took part, there were 3 main sections: sport, volunteering, and learning a skill. For me the sport and the volunteering sections were easy, as I’m a keen cricketer and coached a little. Finding a skill to complete was tricky, until I read one of the items on the list: Go-karting. Being forced to go to the track every week for three months? Sounded like hell, but I was sure I could endure the hardship.

It was during those three months that I improved to a slightly-above-average standard, and so I thought I’d enter a competition that was being run by the company that owned the track. I breezed through the qualification rounds, and was really quite confident going into the day of the finals, but it was the sort of confidence only naivety would create. Almost every single one of the 29 other drivers had their own suits, helmets, gloves, the lot. I didn’t, I just wore what they gave me. Safe to say it didn’t go so well, but still my hunger to get quicker didn’t wane.

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The next few years went by with semi-regular practice and the occasional local competition, but nothing serious. That changed in late 2018, though. October 2018 was when I first went to university, and entered my first championship. I went from mixing it with middle-aged blokes on a Friday night, to racers around my age, yet accomplished in their own right. I was up against British champions, world champions, Formula 4 drivers, and even one guy who’s competing in British Formula 3 this year. Safe to say it was the deep end!

Whilst initially I was a long way off the pace, I also think last year my learning curve was the steepest it had ever been. During a six round championship I went from 14^th in the first round, to having three consecutive fourth-placed finishes, even taking a fastest lap in the final at the fifth round. After all of that, I somehow managed to finish second in the championship. Second! Safe to say last year was my most enjoyable so far behind the wheel.

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This year is different, however. Due to various reasons I haven’t gone back to university, so I’m without competition. Something that I am doing now that I wasn’t at university, though, is earning money, and that got me thinking. I want to keep improving myself as a driver, but I feel like I’m probably fairly close to my potential in a hire-kart, so I need to step things up. Therefore, I want to use what disposable income I do have to go racing for real.

So that’s my racing career to date. I’m not a complete novice, but I’m not the best in the world by a long shot. I’d say I’m good. Just being good doesn’t satisfy me, but I feel like it does give me some valuable experience on this journey over a complete novice. For example, if an opportunity presents itself, I feel I’m in a position where I have enough ability to not completely embarrass myself! After all, writing a blog means I talk a lot of talk, so at some point I’ll have to walk the walk. So if places heightened expectations on me, why would I write the blog?

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Whilst there are thousands of racers out there, not many of them actually talk about how they got to where they are now: what skills they thought they needed, what skills they didn’t think they needed but really did, what eye-opening experiences they had, what mistakes they made etc. What I want to do is be that person, so that future racers can learn from my experiences. After all, one way of making racing more accessible is by making it cheaper, and whilst I can’t dictate the actual cost of entering races, I hope I can at least stop drivers from spending their hard-earned racing budget on experiences that won’t necessarily further their racing careers.

That’s the aim at least. So far, we’re ten weeks in to this journey, and whilst I’ve made some lifestyle adaptations to maximise the little ability I have (click here and here for more on these), alongside looking at what race series I might enter in 2021 (to read further on this click here and here), I’ve not actually visited the track at all this year, probably the longest period of time I’ve gone without karting in some time! Don’t lose all hope, however, as there may be a big event coming soon. My #RacingGrind might actually feature some racing!

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Excited about the #RacingGrind? Sign up to our mailing list to receive every new post straight to your inbox, as soon as it’s published!

Tag: How T Be A Racing Driver

Episode 17

Winning a $1 Million Drive?

Episode 10

“Why Me? Why This?”