LONDON (Reuters) – Spanish MBA graduate Lucas Ordonez will be thankful for all those hours spent playing video games on his sofa when he makes his Le Mans debut this weekend.
The 26-year-old owes his place in the world’s premier 24-hour endurance race to his prowess with a Playstation, beating more than 25,000 ‘gamers’ after entering a Europe-wide GT Academy competition three years ago.
In the space of three years, he has made the transition from Gran Turismo console to car and shown he can be a winner in the real world as well as the virtual.
“Three years ago I was studying for my MBA and now I am in the most prestigious race in the world…it’s quite an amazing story,” the Nissan driver told Reuters from the La Sarthe circuit.
“Every day I was doing the MBA at the same time so when I arrived home at 10 at night I switched on my Playstation and tried to do two or three hours per day. That’s it,” he continued.
“If you spend more than three hours per day it’s impossible. your eyes get red and it’s terrible. You have to be really constant. For about a month I spent three hours a day. That was my plan and that was the way to win the prize.”
The competition was to see how good a gamer could be on a real racetrack and in Ordonez, who comes from a racing family and was a keen go-karter in his early years before being forced to give up through lack of finances to focus on his studies, organisers found their answer.
RUNNER-UP
After competing in 15 races in Britain to get his international race licence, he finished runner-up in the 2009 FIA GT4 European Cup with two wins and six podium finishes in a Nissan 350Z.
At Le Mans he will be sharing the Signatech Oreca Nissan LMP2 car with French team mates Soheil Ayari and Franck Mailleux.
They were 14th in Wednesday night’s first qualifying session, the second best in their prototype category and ahead of some big names.
After this weekend, Ordonez will see out the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup season with races at Imola in Italy, Silverstone in Britain, the Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta in the United States and then China.
“Playstation, the Gran Turismo, is really a good simulator and it really helps, not just for me but for all the drivers, to know the tracks and what speed you can carry on the Le Mans track for example,” said Ordonez.
“You can learn all the braking points, so it’s really helpful. Of course it’s not real driving or real life.
“When you are testing in a real car, you have not many laps to train and there are risks there.
“On the playstation you can train all day every day at home on your sofa and you can crash, press restart and there’s no problem.”
Ordonez said the response from other racing drivers who had worked their way up through the usual routes had been phenomenal.
Peugeot’s Stephane Sarrazin, who took provisional pole on Wednesday night, was one of those who sought him out on arrival at Le Mans because he was amazed to have read the Spaniard’s story in a magazine.
“Everybody is really happy to see me with this story in Le Mans and it’s quite different for them,” said the Spaniard.
“All the gamer community are really following me,” he added, with this year’s GT Academy final nearing its climax with a race drive in a Nissan 370Z in the Dubai 24 Hours as the main prize.
“They are really proud about what I have done in these years…it’s fantastic.”
Ordonez has also been racing his team mates, as well as other racers such as Switzerland’s Neel Jani, on the Playstation and come out a winner.
“I am the fastest on that,” he said. “Now I have to be the fastest in real life.”
(Editing by Clare Fallon)
