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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Millions of racers live out their dreams without even leaving their bedrooms. Surely that’s easier than this whole #RacingGrind?

Sim racing has very quickly become a global phenomenon. For millions of people like myself, who have an intense love of racing although don’t (yet) have the budget to warrant getting behind the wheel for real, racing virtually has become a hugely popular pastime. The draws are understandable, too. After all, when else would you have the opportunity to experience the fastest cars on the planet around any track of your choice, whenever you want? With sim racing, the world is literally at your fingertips.

Alongside the lure of following in the tyre-tracks of motorsport legends, people have managed to secure extremely high profile, lucrative careers as a result of gaming. Examples include British gamers Jann Mardenborough, who secured a Nissan factory race seat after winning the Gran Turismo-based GT Academy in 2011, and James Baldwin, who has won an Aston Martin GT3 drive in this year’s GT World Challenge Europe after winning the World’s Fastest Gamer competition in late 2019.

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There is also a plethora of gamers who are making a living exclusively online. Esports events organised using games such as Gran Turismo and iRacing offer prizes worth tens of thousands of US Dollars to the victors of their competitions, and the Formula 1 game boasts an impressive Esports structure, featuring pairs of contestants backed by all 10 of the Formula 1 constructors.

Should I, therefore, consider saving myself a load of money and obtain my racing fix through a virtual medium? Whilst it does maybe make sense economically in the long-term, I can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed by the whole idea.

Personally, I want to go racing not because I want to make a career out of it, but because of the adrenaline rush that overwhelms me whilst I’m in the cockpit. The feeling of speed that I experience from the wind buffeting my helmet, the lateral forces on my body as I cling on through a high-speed corner, the heat of my body as it’s encapsulated within a race suit and positioned in front of an enraged engine. I like to feel what the car is doing through my bum, yet these feelings just can’t be replicated in a household simulator.

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Of course, simulator work can be utilised as an integral training aid as part of a wider driver training schedule. It is a very effective tool at drilling discipline and consistency behind the wheel, or trying new setups or lines around specific tracks, all at a massively reduced cost. The only money spent during a 3-hour simulator stint is that of the electricity to keep the system running. Completing a 3-hour stint on track in a real car would put strain on the mechanical components of the machine, alongside depleting irrecoverable resources such as tyres and fuel. The most telling cost-saver of all, however, is in the event of a crash. Crash on a sim? Press reset. Crash in real life? Have fun with a rather large bill.

And thus, the question becomes should I be racing online to improve my future on-track results? Almost certainly the answer is yes, I should. But am I going to? Not at this moment in time. As the cover photo for this episode reveals, the only gaming wheel I currently own relates to a PlayStation 2. Not the current 4^th generation platform, not even the previous generation. Nope. 2. It’s safe to say racing games have evolved since 2002, Gran Turismo Sport is a little more advanced than Gran Turismo 3. In order to gain meaningful practice, I would have to invest in a new games console or PC, along with the wheel/pedals, and I don’t want to do that for the following reasons:

With Sony and Microsoft due to release their successors to the PS4 and Xbox 1 within the year, it does not make sense to me to buy one of the current consoles. This is because new titles will not be published on the current consoles for much longer, and so the system would become obsolete within the next couple of years, putting me back at square 1. This for me puts consoles out of the question.

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With this in mind, I’ll turn my attention to PCs. If I were to buy myself a PC with the same specifications as the ‘recommended’ requirements to run the F1 2019 game, I would need to invest at least £800 (US$1000). Combine that with the ~£200 for a low-mid range wheel/pedals combo, and I’ve just spent £1000 on my ‘cheap’ training aid. With how limited my current budget is, that could be the difference between me actually going racing or not. Would it be wise to potentially jeopardise my absolute involvement in order to secure a marginal gain? I think not.

In short, sim racing is certainly a credible option to facilitate on-track performance improvements, and for some it is even a perfect alternative. For me, however, the lack of instinctive tangible feedback and a substantial initial investment deter me from virtually becoming a racing driver.

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Enjoyed reading this article? Let us know your thoughts with a comment below! All that’s needed is an email address, and don’t worry, there’ll be no junk mail!

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: World's Fastest Gamer

Episode 17

Winning a $1 Million Drive?

Episode 05