Motorsports Can Diversify by Putting Video Gamers in Drivers Seat

Today's guest columnist is Rick Burton of Syracuse University.

I got a press release recently from a sports league, a start-up, that foolishly counts me as an advisor. That means this column screams "conflict of interest." Guilty as charged.

Setting aside the compromising of my journalistic integrity, I’m intrigued enough about the entrepreneurial venture I’m watching unfold to suggest there is value in alerting Sportico readers to a novel pro sports concept just starting out.

This is not about virtual reality (a favorite topic of mine) but does involve esports. Here's the simple premise: What if playing a video game was, in fact, immersive training and led to real life athletic achievement?

Stepping back, we know if everyone could shoot 68 every time they golfed, there would be millions on the PGA or LIV Tours. The same holds with tennis, basketball or ice hockey players. We believe the next Tiger Woods or Serena Williams is crawling around our family room, and, if given the right parental encouragement, they’ll grow up to dominate the professional sports world.

This "everyone can make it" myth is so strong that author Matthew Syed wrote Bounce: Mozart, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success because, at 24, he was Britain's No. 1 table tennis player.

In his 2010 book, he asked, "what had marked me out for sporting greatness?" and answered his own question by suggesting numerous traits led to his success: "speed, guile, gutsiness, mental strength, adaptability, agility and reflexes." But he also acknowledged the kinds of bias consistently clouding our understanding of elite achievement.

"We like to think that sport is a meritocracy," wrote Syed, "where achievement is driven by ability and hard work—but it is nothing of the sort. Practically every man or woman who triumphs against the odds is, on closer inspection, a beneficiary of unusual circumstances."

Syed notes that if a large enough group of youngsters were given his advantages (a tennis table at home, a brilliant older brother to practice against, one of the top coaches in the country, a 24-hour place to train and an ability to practice for thousands of hours as a teen), he would never have arrived at the top. In fact, he doubts he would have made the top 1,000.

Simply stated, he had advantages. My intuition suggests this is almost always the case, but in auto racing, equestrian activities and competitive yachting, the not-so-secret advantage is money. The cost to "go racing" today eliminates almost everyone but the wealthy. This is humorous when one considers NASCAR's roots trace back to fast backwoods moonshiners, not Daddy Warbucks. But it's nonetheless true.

For the average family to get their youngster into a competitive go-kart and keep them in that seat long enough to get noticed as a teen is fabulously expensive. There are not only the vehicles and the driver's protective gear to consider, but parents/guardians must also buy tires, gas, oil, access to a good mechanic and a rig for hauling it all. As they go up the ladder and costs mount, they must find sponsors.

Meanwhile, across the globe, there are millions of young people playing racing video games like Forza, Gran Turismo, iRacing, RaceRoom, Street Kart Racing, Need for Speed and others. Could piloting a simulated vehicle on a mobile device, iPad or PC create Syed's talent advantage?

What if video gamers, playing for thousands of hours, via titles incorporating various forms of steering and accelerating, braking and drafting, could "win" their way into a real car on a real racetrack? What if poor or diverse drivers could move from easily accessible video games or simulators to racing on world-class tracks?

The diversity question is important in this discussion because today's current Formula 1, NASCAR and Indy Car ranks do not reflect anything like the racial or gender makeup of the countries where they’re popular. In fact, despite many DEIA efforts by the sanctioning bodies, most elite professional drivers ("as seen on TV") are still white and male.

That's what made the Racing Prodigy press release I received notable. There in the first paragraph it said: "the world's first e2Real sports league has been built to make motorsports more accessible using esports as the pathway to racing [real] cars on real tracks. This greatly reduces the financial barriers to pursuing a career in motorsports, leveling the playing field and enabling millions to pursue their dreams."

David Cook, Racing Prodigy's CEO and a former business development manager of Mazda's Motorsports division, "saw firsthand sim racers beating the real-world racers," suggesting skills learned digitally or virtually could "directly transfer to real life." That caused him to believe motorsports’ "access problem" could be solved.

Need a parallel consideration? If the NFL and NBA rely on the NCAA system to develop talent, enticing rich and poor alike (not to mention international students) into the player pipeline with college scholarships, could the professional racing world not look upon racing games and simulators as a route for identifying talent and delivering valuable diversity?

To be sure, this concept is not new. Mazda, Porsche and BMW have all experimented with esports and simulators. They know driving skills are transferrable from the digital/VR world.

What makes auto racing so interesting is what the drivers do in the real cars, especially when the corners are tight and the speeds high. What's wrong with giving more people a chance to see how well it can be done?

As I said earlier, I’m announcing my conflict of interest. But this "e2Real" concept fascinates and provides one more version of tomorrow's tech-fueled sports world. And given the upcoming August release of the feature film Gran Turismo, where "scrawny" gamers are given the chance to race real cars, Racing Prodigy's new league sounds incredibly timely.

Rick Burton is the David B. Falk Professor Sport Management at Syracuse University and COO of Playbk Sports. His WWII novel, Into the Gorge, will be released by Subplot Publishing next week.