The epic GT Academy 2011 was announced for Europe at the start of this year and was promised to be bigger and better than ever. The event would kick-off with an online Time-Trial challenge around a custom Eifel-style circuit created by Gran Turismo godfather, Kazunori Yamauchi. In keeping with the Nissan involvement, the car we were to use would be a totally standard Nissan 370Z Z34, with it's 320+bhp 3.7 litre V6 engine. The aim of this time trial was to find the 20 fastest gamers in each of the named regions, with our region being the UK and Ireland.
As soon as the competition went live at the beginning of March I began laying down times. The track was fast and flowing, but very technical, with lots of gradient and camber changes, with pretty much the only section of flat tarmac being the main straight. This track rewarded a careful and considered approach, and punished those who pushed too hard and too aggressively. Unfortunately, to get the very fastest times, people realised that there were several corners where running the car wide and putting the outside two wheels well into the grass would yield faster laps. This meant that an optimum time was a very tricky prospect. Within a week I had managed to get my times inside the top 20, and now just needed to find little snippets of time here and there to keep improving as the others around me did the same.
At this point, around 10 days into the Time-Trial, it was announced that there would be two ‘Wild-Card’ events held, with the prize at each event being a ticket into the national finals. The first event was to be held by Nissan at their Innovation Station within the O2 arena in East London, with the second to be held across several Game Retails stores in places like Reading and Edinburgh. In addition to the overall prize of the Wild-Card entry, there was to be a daily prize at the O2 consisting of some Nissan goodies and, more importantly, a Logitech Driving Force GT steering wheel. Maybe it was fete forcing my hand to get me to go, but four days before the event at the O2 was due to kick off (lasting three days), my trusty Logitech G25 wheel, which I had owned for nearly three years, started to suffer severe issues with the potentiometers in two of the pedals,meaning setting fast laps was now a pipe dream as the throttle would fluctuate wildly on the straights. I couldn’t allow a failing set of pedals to keep me from the National Finals, so I decided to give the Nissan Innovation Station event a bash, simply to try my hand at winning a wheel, and thus enabling me to get back in the hunt for the Time-Trial top20.
What would the format be? Who would be competing? Did I stand even a slight chance? All these things were running through my mind the night before the event kicked off, and I knew that this would be my first true test of performing in a high pressure environment. Who would come out on top.....
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