Virtual Racing Need To Sort Itself Out, Says GT Academy Founder

Remember during Covid when all the racing stopped because of lockdown? Many of us turned to virtual racing for our adrenaline fix, and the rise of esports in a very short space of time was remarkable.

Suddenly the biggest names in motorsport, past and present, were on their computers battling for supremacy online. With F1 having already launched its own esports series, the best online racers were taking on the best real-world drivers for our entertainment. It seemed like The Moment for esports racing to go prime time.

But it hasn’t really happened. Lockdowns ended, real racing came back and while some real-world drivers are still ardent online racers, the interest the wider world had in watching virtual track battles has died down.

“I think it's in a bit of flux at the moment,” says Darren Cox, the ex-Nissan man who founded the GT Academy and kickstarted the link between virtual racing and the real thing. That project is the subject of the new Gran Turismo movie, which is released this month. Darren was also involved in the Mercedes and Aston Martin F1 esports programmes, and helped organise big ticket virtual races during Covid, featuring drivers like Sebastian Vettel, MarioAndretti, Jenson Button and Emerson Fittipaldi.

After the high of Covid, he thinks today’s esports industry has too many series and needs to streamline in order to generate mass appeal. “I'm not trying to decry where we are,” Darren says, “but at the moment, you've got just so many different championships. All the platforms seem to have at least two championships of different levels that are vying for attention, which means no one gets any attention.”

While F1’s own esports programme claims big viewership, Darren has his doubts about its success compared to its potential. “We have to believe the numbers that F1 put out, but  they're not as strong as they could be. [The F1 Esports Series] is the overarching ‘big dog’ in this space, but we’ve seen the ESL championship, they’ve tried to set up with massive money behind it and it just doesn’t get any traction. The views are tiny – you get bigger viewers for an online stream of the club races at Brands Hatch on a Saturday afternoon. So there is something wrong. It’s just so diverse, everything’s all over the place, there's nowhere where that’s a centre of gravity.”

Motorsport UK – the UK's real-world racing governing body – has also set up its own esports series, and Darren says is understandable but symptomatic of the problem. “You can't help yourself, right? You want to do your own thing. You want to have control of it. [But] I think there's a moment of reckoning that needs to come. There needs to be some sort of streamlining of it. There was this massive spike over Covid and then reality sets in.”

Ironically, part of the problem in Darren’s eyes is how well motorsport has bounced back after the pandemic. “Unfortunately for esports racing, motorsport was probably the best managed sport overall coming out of Covid, and then you’ve got Drive to Survive, etc etc. Look at the crowds we’re getting now in F1 and some lower level motorsport events as well. That means there’s less space for people doing the virtual thing because they want to have the real thing.

“So what’s next? I hope some consolidation. I hope that it becomes like real motorsport; two of three championships become predominant in terms of the coverage and they get the investment that they need to progress it. Covid proved that it could work, it’s just that the environment is very different now. It needs people to have their heads banged together to not be competing with each other, but try and work for the greater good of virtual racing and cross over into fandom for real racing.”