Today's gamers are challenging the notion that you must start young and have hands-on racing experience to become a driving pro. As a matter of fact, Gran Turismo Academy has yielded some now successful budding racers, including Jann Mardenborough. Through the Academy, anyone can compete wheel-to-wheel in a virtual online competition for a chance to race on real tracks and an opportunity to enter the profession of racecar driving.
Though he didn't drive on a full-size racecourse until he was 19 years old, Mardenborough's experience playing the video game Gran Turismo in his bedroom gave him many of the skills he needed to perform on real circuits. After winning the 2011 European Gran Turismo Academy online competition, he was awarded with the opportunity to take part in a race development course with Nissan. Mardenborough stated that the video games and GT Academy competition gave him skills that were surprisingly similar to those needed when driving a real racecar. For example, he'd never actually been sliding in a car, but recalled the following: "During the national final I was sideways in a 370Z and I was just doing what I was doing in the game."
Even with the success of Mardenborough and others, it may still be hard to believe that a video game could lead to a real-world boost in driving skills. However, scientific tests performed by Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester and University of Geneva reveal that this could very well be true. Bavelier studied and compared the ability of gamers and nongamers to identify, locate and track objects, and discovered that the gamers were up to 50 percent better at these skills, which is evidence that video games can rewire the brain in a sense. So, if you know a young teen who's exceptionally good at the video game Gran Turismo, you may just be looking at a future racecar driver.
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