2013’s GT Academy alumni, pictured before their Le Mans class victory. From left: Florian Strauss, Stanislav Aksenov, Nick McMillen and Miguel Faísca.

Four months ago, Miguel Faísca was not a race driver. But in January, he and three other Gran Turismo players – Florian Strauss, Nick McMillen and Stansislav Aksenov – finished first in the Dubai 24 Hours SP2 class. These GT Academy graduates were recruited based on their performance in the Gran Turismo 6 demo last year and all qualified for their race licences after just two months of intensive training. A second GT Academy team came in third.The question of whether virtual skill could translate to real-world success was first posed by GT Academy back in 2008. In the years since, the alliance between Sony and Nissan to find new racing talent has become a reliable source of drivers for Nissan’s Nismo race team.When Bob Neville of RJN Motorsports, Mark Bowles of SCEE and Darren Cox, the head of Nissan’s motorsports division, first met in 2008, Neville gambled on a mad proposition: that he could take a gaggle of Gran Turismo fans, put them in Nissan cars, and find a genuine racer. But Neville isn’t exactly short on confidence. “If you gave me 20 bricklayers,” he says, “and if they were of the right age, fitness and temperament, with the determination to become race drivers, we would find one with talent and we would train them into a professional driver.”

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