Formula One drivers Jarno Trulli and Kazuki Nakajima, along with WRC champion Sebastian Loeb, have all used Gran Turismo games to learn real life circuits.
Writing for the Japan Times Online, veteran motoring journalist Peter Lyon revealed that several racing drivers used the simulator to learn tracks they were unfamiliar with.
“Even Formula 1 racing drivers such as Toyota’s Jarno Trulli and Williams’ Kazuki Nakajima have been seen practicing in front of a console,” said Lyon. “Whenever a new track comes onto the racing calendar, like Fuji Speedway did last October after a 30-year absence, and drivers cannot get there to practice for real, many fire up Gran Turismo.
“They say it’s the only way to memorise the track layout and braking markers — the points where you must start killing the speed to take an upcoming corner.”
However, the highest praise came from four time World Rally Champion Sebastian Loeb. Recalling his build-up to the 2005 Le Mans 23 hours (where Loeb spent a day using GT4 to learn the famous Le Sarth circuit), the French ace said, “It's more than a game now,” adding, “It’s so precise that this 'game' has become a full-blown driving simulator, and just about every driver I know uses it for practice these days.”
While Loeb’s comments especially do smack somewhat of PR spiel (the Pescarolo-Judd Loeb drove in the 2005 endurance classic featured both PlayStation 2 and Gran Turismo 4 sponsorship), nevertheless, Lyon himself put the game (which isn’t mentioned by name, but given the tracks mentioned, is likely to be GT4) to the test and found it does help you learn circuits.
Having spent a day practicing the Nürburgring circuit in GT4, he headed down to the notorious German circuit, finding that Polyphony Digital’s recreation was so accurate that every corner of the real track felt “uncannily familiar” right down to little details such as the height of the Armco barriers.
He then proceeded to invite Polyphony’s head honcho Kazunori Yamauchi to join him in an endurance race in an MX-5. With the legendary developer having done over 2,000 laps of the Tsukuba circuit in the game, Yamauchi only needed a dozen or so laps to get himself up to the same speed as the other competitors, many of whom had been driving around the circuit for years.
With Gran Turismo 5 set to mark the series’ full next-gen debut sometime this year, we can’t wait to see how Yamauchi and his team have been able to use all the additional processing power of the PS3 - although if our hands-on with the Prologue teaser version is anything to go by, it should be awesome.
For Lyon’s full (and fascinating) article, point your mouse over here.
