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Gran Turismo Gamer Takes Second In Class In World-Renowned Race
dotarray writes "If your parents tell you that playing video games will never get you anywhere, point them in the direction of Lucas Ordoñez. Three years ago, Lucas heard about a competition for racing game fans – the Nissan PlayStation GT Academy. Inspired, Lucas picked up a PlayStation 3 and a copy of Gran Turismo and practiced and practiced and practiced. This week, along with his teammates Franck Mailleux and Soheil Ayari, Lucas could not stop smiling as he stood on the Le Mans 24 Hours podium after taking second in class."
Great, now all my time playing Madden has not been in vain! Huge NFL contract, here I come.
Finishing a Le Mans is impressive enough.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Yes, of 56 Teams, only 28 finished. The Signatech Nissan team came in 2nd of 11 in class, seems 9th overall.
To get in the pilot's seat of an Airbus A380. All those flying lessons in my den will pay off big time.
Considering the differences in power, weight, and aerodynamics of LMP1 and LMP2 cars, you have to separate by class. Finishing second in his class is finishing second; only chance a LMP2 car has of finishing second out of the entire course would be mechanical failures on each LMP1 car.
they seem to have gotten 9th overall (out of 56 who started) , which is even more impressive... according to http://www.lemans.org/en/races/24h-du-mans/live-2011/live-timing.html here
Unfortunately a lot of people will read this and not understand how grueling Le Mans is. Its a 24 hour endurance race. Its designed to be hard just to compete in, never mind winning.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Be born rich, don't be poor. How do you make a small fortune in auto racing? Start with a large one.
Guy who is good at driving also plays video games about driving.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And, with there being multiple classes on the track... nasty incidents (usually between the prototypes (LMP1 and LMP2) and the GT Endurance cars) can and do occur.
There were three Audis at the start of the race, after 1 hour, one was completely DESTROYED.
At the halfway point, another was even worse off.
Both drivers got out of their own cars, and one even returned to the track the next day after being checked out at the hospital.
""If your parents tell you that playing video games will never get you anywhere, point them in the direction of Lucas Ordoñez."
Basic math: You can't draw a curve through a single point.
Not to mention that if you don't have the far-side-of-the-bell-curve combination of high eye/hand coordination, fine motors skills, and cognitive abilities (each pretty far over on their own bell curves too), it doesn't matter how many video games you play.
I suppose I should have picked a game besides frogger to get good at.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
Even finishing the 24 Hours of Le Mans is a huge achievement.
(Completing any 24 hour sports car race is, for that matter, even if it's 3rd out of 5 in the class.)
But, this was 2nd out of 11 in class, 8 classified as completing in class.
And, it was 9th overall out of 56, with 28 classified as completing. All of the first seven places were taken by the faster LMP1 class (and all of the first five places were taken by the remaining diesel cars).
UMM the top gear team were in a 24 hour race but I'm pretty sure it WASN'T le-mans. le-mans is probablly the most famous 24 hour race in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_24_Hours_of_Le_Mans
According to wikipedia this guy's car (note: in 24 hour races there are multiple drivers per car entered) was second in the LMP2 class and ninth overall.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yeah, but the Top Gear team competed in a local endurance race. Ordoñez and his team competed in Le Mans, one of the most celebrated auto races in history. He competed in an incredibly difficult race against a field of 11 different competing teams. Kudos to him.
Commenting on where they finished overall shows a lack of understanding of multi-class races.
Multiple classes of cars race on the same track together, adding a lot of moving speed bumps for the fast cars and strategy for the slower cars. You aren't competing against the faster cars in the slower cars, you're competing against your own class.
Imagine formula 1 and stock cars simultaneously on big oval at Daytona. There's no contest between the classes, but it adds a lot to the experience.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Good for him but I don't know that I'd pick Gran Turismo as my top choice for a sim. Plenty of stuff on the PC, like anything from Papyrus, iRacing. I think Forza is even better. But good on him, nonetheless.
Well, back before LMP2 was neutered, it tended to compete with LMP1 for the overall win in American Le Mans Series races (which pissed Audi off quite a lot, because they'd be the LMP1 winner, which is what matters for championships, but they didn't get the bragging rights for the overall win),
+1 for being dead-on. I'd like to see AC do 5 laps at speed on that course. At night.
What's interesting about racing is the pool of people able to pursue it as a career is so small that the chances of you getting the most talented natural racers into the sport are astronomically low. With soccer, track, football, baseball, etc., you have a way to work your way up from schools or the streets; if you're truly great at the sport chances are good you'll be found out and put in a position to compete. With racing you have a tiny pool of people connected enough to the sport (frequently through family members), wealthy or driven enough (drive does not necessarily imply talent) to do whatever it takes to get behind the wheel.
Lucas Ordonez was already well on the way to becoming a racing driver.
This guy wasn't a regular gamer. He karted as a kid until he was sixteen, when his family couldn't afford it anymore. Karting is where anyone with any racing aspirations starts before they move up to the junior formulas. Lucas Ordonez just had a delay in his career development and got his FIA racing licenses through a very unorthodox channel - Sony's GT Academy.
Racing success is all about the size of your bankroll and essentially, Sony paid for Lucas Ordonez.
Gran Turismo 5 hasn't been out even one year yet.
Second in class can mean sod all.
After all the Top Gear team came 3rd in class....out of 5 total if I remember correctly.
Spoken like any true fan of top gear. That show is filled with self satisfied pompous a-holes. How exactly would this person's achievement be overshadowed by the likes of a-holes who are paid to review and drive actual cars?
If anything his placement shows that these entitled pricks can't hold a candle to people with true determination and "drive". Sod all. Indeed.
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
How is this different from any other young race car driver? I'm not seeing the story here.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Can someone please translate all that into NASCAR?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Lucas will now have to spend the rest of his life working in the quick lube stall at Sony's fleet maintenance
Ha, he WISHES! For an offense like that, it's off to Sony's silicon mines. He'll dig right next to GeoHot.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As much as I hate to do this, because it's not right at all... the NASCAR analogy of the 24 Hours of Le Mans would be running a Sprint Cup race, a Nationwide Series race, and a regional-level actual STOCK race (that is, stock unibodies and stock-derived engines and suspension)... all on the same track (and not an oval), all at once, for 24 hours instead of a certain mileage.
In that analogy, this would be the equivalent of placing 2nd in the Nationwide Series race.
Now, excuse me while I go contemplate drinking a few gallons of bleach, for daring to make that analogy...
I drank formula...I was one. It got me where I needed to be.
Spoken like someone who's never raced.
The short version: Opportunity cost. If you're working 9-5, it's very hard to sit down on the console for hours on end to play racing games. It's very hard to take several days a month off to go drive real cars at your local track. If someone else is paying for your track time, meals, and roof, you have a huge edge over the guys who fund their racing budget with a 9-5 job.
I say this as a person who's done it. My first exposure to Infineon raceway was playing Tourist Trophy on a PS2. I learned the layout of the track thanks to the game. I took a few days away from work to ride the track. I raced 3 events there, finally taking a 3rd place trophy home with me.
Holding a job and racing is very very very difficult. Even if you can afford the track time, do you have a job that permits you to take a day off every few weeks to practice? Will your job tolerate you missing work to recover from injury? Do you really think you can compete with the people who spend their lives trackside, or who have been driving/riding since they were 5?
i mean, how many football fields are we talking here? and if i stacked them one on the other, how high would they reach?
teaching kids that there is nothing unusual or abnormal about deriving entertainment from killing people, so that they lose the natural 'anti-killing' instinct that platoon leaders had to contend with in WWII.
google killology for more info
rich people have a lot of their own problems. emotional, psychological, etc.
great game. i love the part where unemployment is stuck at 9% for 4 years in a row and you cant do a damn thing.
Back when I was doing the whole pro race driver thing, I'd spend several hours a week on a PS/2 and several different driving games.
It's not *exactly* the same - in particular, a lot of feedback about where the tires are relative to the grip level comes through your ass - but there's enough overlap to make the exercise worthwhile.
And especially for road courses like LeMans, the game (which duplicates the track pretty faithfully) can be a real help trying to memorize where the course goes. Much of road racing is knowing which turn follows which an where the racing line is.
Jacques Villeneuve used to do the same thing.
On the military side of things, AFV simulators like Steel Beasts Pro (which uses the real-life FCS and realistic ballistics) is great turret training. I had to be shown where the various controls were in the real turret, but once my face was in the sight, it was exactly the same. Shocked the hell out of the IG when the "newbie" was putting rounds on target and making the right corrections on his very first live fire.
So yes, for certain skills, simulation games can make a huge difference in Real Life.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
You must have missed the episode where Jeremy plays GT4 (I think it was 4) to learn laguna seca... then tries it for real. He couldn't come close to his lap times, and he even says the techniques, while close, on the PS3 don't quite translate to the real world, and in the game you don't get the fear you get on the track. He also mentions how it feels as if the walls are right beside you, and it feels like you are going to smash into one at any point.
You missed the implied criticism of Top Gear. His whole point is that if that bunch of entitled pricks that can't hold a candle to people with true determination and "drive" can get 3rd in class, merely going one better isn't necessarily fantastic.
Other posters have highlighted why the comparison is perhaps unfair, and even managed to do so without slating a very popular TV entertainment show with a minor bias towards motoring.
Believe it or not surgeons who play games may make less mistakes. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4685909/ns/technology_and_science-games/t/surgeons-may-err-less-playing-video-games/
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
For those that want to know more about what the 24 Le Mans is, and how it is different from other races around the world, there's a great movie called "Truth in 24" which is available from iTunes for free. I think Audi sponsored it. A good movie, even if you're not a racing fan.