British GT Championship novice Jann Mardenborough aims for British GT Gold (w/VIDEO)

Interview: Jann Mardenborough

• Jann spoke with Stefan, from TheSixthAxis.com, at his 21st birthday celebrations.

  Q:  What was the main thing that you had to adapt to when going from Gran Turismo 5 to real life?

  JM:  The main difference was the vision. For me personally, I had a little 13” television, so my eyes are constantly fixated on the screen, they don’t even move!

  In a race car, especially for [Brooklands into Luffield] where you’re heading down at 150mph, you have to be looking to the left into the corner. Initially it’s difficult to do that, because you’re programmed to look dead ahead and you don’t want to look over there and it’s not where you’re going at that point. It does take a lot of practice, and that was the major difference really.

  The other thing that comes with time is the sensation you get through your backside and lower spine from the car moving around beneath you. Obviously with a wheel and a game you just get all your sensations through your hands. It does help actually, it just takes a while for that to get programmed into your brain, and what’s happening at certain stages which lets you predict what’s going to happen. Those are the main two areas really but vision is the most important one to get used to.

  Q:  On the flip side, what could you take over to real driving from the game? Was there anything you could just take straight across?

  JM:  Well yeah, with GT5 it’s a driving simulator so [features] things like car control, steering inputs and how to control a car mid-slide. I’d never power-slid a car before coming to GT Academy, and at the national final I had a 370z completely sideways which I’d never done before in real life. All I was doing was what I did in the game and it seemed to be working.

  Heel and toe techniques, racing techniques which you can do in the game with wheel and pedals. Left foot braking, which you can practice in the game then do in real life. There’s a lot of things that you can do on the game, and I think to set a fast lap on GT5 there are certain things that you can do which then transfer across to a qualifying lap in real life. So that’s fantastic.

  There’s a definite link there between hand-eye coordination that the game provides and it’s helped me out massively!

  Q:  What do you think about the weight transfer in Gran Turismo 5? How closely does it simulate the real thing?

  JM:  With the new Gran Turismo 5 Academy Edition, the one that’s coming out this month, the car that’s included on there is the one which Lucas and Kazunori raced at the Nurburgring. I was there, and Polyphony had a load of sensors in the race car and from all the data that they gathered in real life, they had the car in a special version of GT5 where an engineer could edit it on the fly.

  I was driving the car in the game, and Lucas said that it was exactly the same as in real life. Just that. The amount of detail that they put into it is incredible. It’s my favourite driving game anywhere.

  Q:  What is your absolute favourite dream car? In GT5 or otherwise?

  JM:  My favourite car… well it’s a Nissan GTR! But outside of that, I’d say maybe a Porsche Carrera GT is probably my favourite car.

  Q:  Where are you heading with your career next year? Are you sticking with British GT?

  JM:  I don’t know what the plan exactly is, what I’m going to be doing, but they’re working on next year’s contracts for me and I’ll be happy whatever I’m doing.

  Personally, I’d love to do another season in GT3 class, because the car’s in its first year of racing at the moment and it’s not on the pace yet to be honest. It’s not a front leading car, and we’ve been talking about the upgrades for next year, which looks really promising, and I’ve helped develop this car currently. So it would be lovely to see it when it’s got a year under its belt, and hopefully we can come out of the door strongly.