The Sony Pictures Movie is Based on the True Story of a Gamer Turned Race Car Driver
By John Oreovicz
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Longtime devotees of the Gran Turismo video game franchise are intimately familiar with fictional tracks such as Deep Forest Raceway, Trial Mountain Circuit and High Speed Ring. But they are unlikely to know the very real story of Jann Mardenborough.
A 31-year-old from the Wales district of England, Mardenborough parlayed his online driving skills into an ongoing career as a real-world racer. His story forms the basis of “Gran Turismo,” a Sony Pictures Entertainment motion picture that debuts in theaters on Friday and stars Orlando Bloom, Archie Madekwe and David Harbour.
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From 2008 to ’16, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Nissan hosted an annual competition known as GT Academy that gave expert video game drivers the opportunity to see if their skills translated to actual cars and tracks. Mardenborough was the European winner of the 2011 GT Academy, and since then, he has raced a variety of high-level sports cars and open-wheel cars around the world.
His diverse competition résumé includes three starts in the 24 Hours of Le Mans and a one-off run in the 2014 Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, where he shared a Nissan-ORECA prototype with established sports car aces Lucas Luhr and Klaus Graf. They led 12 laps before dropping out with a power steering failure.
While the movie focuses on Mardenborough’s sports car exploits through 2015, his career then took him into GP3 and GP2 – Formula 1 feeder series – before he embarked on a five-year stint to Japan, driving Super Formula open wheelers and Super GT sports cars. Ironically, he spent the last two years as a simulator driver for Nissan and McLaren Formula E programs while also assisting in the production of the Gran Turismo movie.
Mardenborough made his return to real-world racing in June at the Fuji 24 Hours. He’s eager to be back in a car full time.
“The target for next year will be Hypercar or LMDh,” he told reporters on a conference call promoting the movie. “That’s the dream, and doing some GT3 racing in IMSA would be cool.”
The concept for the Gran Turismo game was developed by Kazunori Yamauchi and the 1997 original was lauded for its crisp graphics and realistic depiction of cars and racetracks, both real and imagined. The game is now in its seventh iteration, and Yamauchi marvels how much the technology and presentation have advanced. “GT1 kind of looks like an old Atari ‘Pong’ game,” he chuckled.
Quickly emerging as a star property, Sony developed Gran Turismo into far more than a video game. Yamauchi and his crew helped Nissan develop the dash layout and interface for the GT-R sports car, and they collaborated with Citroen to create a prototype future sports car that was unveiled at the 2015 Paris Auto Show. The “Gran Turismo” movie is the ultimate celebration of the game’s role in shifting car and racing culture.
Since the release of the original Gran Turismo game more than 25 years ago, simulators have been developed to play a crucial role in the design and setup of real-world racing cars. And Yamauchi believes that practicing driving skills online can benefit everyone.
“I think it is very useful for typical, regular drivers to learn how a car responds to your input,” he said. “Even if you are not driving at racing speed – for example, if you are in the freeway in the rain – you learn how you are not supposed to drive the car. It really helps out.”