Jann Mardenborough, the gamer-turned-championship-racer and subject of last year’s Gran Turismo movie, recently won the Gulf Historic competition in Dubai driving the same Ligier JS P2 car he drove at Le Mans.
In a Forbes interview, the 32-year-old told me that he’d like to figure out a way to recreate the historic GT Academy program. The partnership between Nissan and Sony, creator of the Gran Turismo video game, got him his start. Also, attention sponsors: He’s on the hunt for a potential team to race this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans race this June.
Mardenborough won his way into GT Academy by being one of the best in the world at the Gran Turismo simulation racing game, then training to drive real cars. The movie covers his win, his training and his eventual triumph at Le Mans, where he took third in his class. It’s currently streaming on Netflix.
I caught up with Mardenborough in an airport on his way to Dubai.
Heather Newman: How did you originally start playing Gran Turismo?
Jann Mardenborough: It was a gift. It’s pretty wild, the ripple effect of things. In the [United Kingdom] we have Bonfire Night every November 5th. I was seven years old, and instead of socializing with my parents’ friends, I was playing on their PlayStation One and Gran Turismo. After that day, I’d come home from school all the time and just be playing in their house. So the wife gifted it to my parents. It all started from a gift.
Newman: How much time did you spend playing when you were a kid?
Mardenborough: I guess from age seven or eight till 19, it probably averaged two hours a day. There’ll be days where I’d be spending eight hours, but there’ll be days where it’s one hour. I reckon it probably averages out to two hours [a day] for about 11 years.
Newman: What kept you coming back to the Gran Turismo franchise, specifically?
Mardenborough: Even when I was seven or eight years old, I could distinguish that GT was special. The physics made sense to me. I didn’t know what it was like to drive a car, but I could tell just from the way that the car acts that this is realistic, compared to a racing game that you’d find an arcade.
I was very much against that—not willing to play any arcade stuff. That was because I would love to drive these fancy amazing cars in real life, so it was important to me that what I’m playing at home was as accurate as possible to the real thing. I’ve had this ever since I was seven or eight, and it’s still important to me to this day.
Newman: How early were you certain that this was your dream?
Mardenborough: I guess eight years old. That’s when I had the concept of what the job was. My father always told me, do something in life which is your purpose and that you’re passionate about. He was a soccer player, he did it because of the love of the game. Not until I was 19, when I won the competition… really, it’s not like I used this game thinking, “This is going to help me somehow get a job in the future.” I played the game because I liked it, and I saw an opportunity through the competition.
Newman: Clearly you had years and years of practice. But how did you prepare for the competition?
Mardenborough: I think I was in the right place at the right time. I just dropped out of university maybe four months, three months prior to this. And around eight months prior to entering the competition, I acquired a wheel and pedals. I bought an old Alpha Romeo leather seat from the scrapyard, and I built this frame out of wood. And then with my results money from exams that I did when I was 17 or 18, I purchased the wheel and pedals. Then I went to university… then I dropped out.
The thing that I built, I used to qualify for the academy. I still have it home. So that was my preparation. It was eight, nine hours a day grinding, trying to go quicker just to qualify.
Newman: At what point during the competition did you think, okay, I really have a shot at this?
Mardenborough: It was the last day of the finals at Silverstone and I said to myself, let’s see how far I can go. There were only four competitors left, me included. I qualified first. And that was the only time I ever allowed myself to have any feeling of, okay, maybe we have a chance now. It was the only time I allowed myself to say, okay, maybe we can dream a little bit here, and maybe win.
Newman: How did that last race go for you? Were you confident all the way through?
Mardenborough: So the race and the academy process, that’s my favorite part of the movie. They show I wasn’t the top dog guy entering. I’d never driven on a track before, never driven any powerful cars. So if you’d ask the instructors during that time, I wasn’t number one on day 1, 2, 3, 4, but I was showing consistency.
Newman: Was the movie realistic?
Mardenborough: In the movie they showed the ranking, which isn’t true to real life. In real life it was much more mentally taxing, because you didn’t know where you ranked. Of course in the movie, they have to show where you rank, so the audience understands what’s going on. But I didn’t know where I ranked compared to everybody else. I just had to watch visually and try and work out where I am and improve.
Newman: Did you think you were the one to beat?
Mardenborough: No, I didn’t think I was top dog. I just focused on myself and try to improve on the weak areas that I was struggling with, and to not repeat the mistakes and just get faster. But I certainly wasn’t top dog. I didn’t think I had this to lose. I actually lost the lead quite early on, because I missed the gear. I thought, damn, okay, let’s try and overtake the guy again. And I did, and then won by a big margin.
Newman: Tell me about some of those weak areas that you were trying to improve on.
Mardenborough: It was psychological. I had a mentor say to me, your personality needs to come out. In driving, it’s like dancing. If you’re uptight, it really shows—you become robotic. I was afraid of making a mistake. I was there because I was good, but then you need the little bit of spice to unlock that. To really unleash your full potential, you have to commit completely. That was limiting me in the early stages, because I was so afraid of making an error, which is not the way to go in life or sports.
Newman: Talk to me about the actual physical demands of racing. How difficult was it for you?
Mardenborough: In racing, you work muscles you never really work in everyday life—muscles in your hands, for example, in your forearms, in your neck. You wake up after doing three days at a racetrack and you’ve got a muscle behind your ear and you’re like, yeah, that hurts. How does that hurt? It’s very demanding. It’s taxing on the shoulders and your upper body. The G forces—of course we have a race seat, which is very tight, but you still need a lot of inner core strength to hold you up in the seat.
Newman: How do the G forces affect you?
Mardenborough: I think our heads weigh four pounds. [Ed.: It’s actually eleven pounds.] Going around some corners, you can have four times the force of gravity, so your head weighs four times as much and you’ve got the helmet on as well. You really work. These muscles would never get worked before.
Newman: What else is physically challenging?
Mardenborough: The car temperature can get up to 50, 60 degrees [122-140 degrees Fahrenheit]. So your heart rate is always high. Your heart is always pumping, so you burn a lot of calories as well. It’s very taxing aerobically and you work strange muscles. It’s not like just sitting in the chair and turning some wheels and feet pedals like I was doing at home. Naturally your heart rate rises because it’s in self-preservation mode, so that’s demanding as well on your body, and for a prolonged amount of time. So there’s a lot of mental motor sport as well.
Newman: What do you do for physical training?
Mardenborough: My training’s switched up quite a few times throughout my career, and now I’m in a phase of training quite differently. I do a lot of weight training. There’s a delicate game to be had with being light as possible. The engineers tell you they can measure the time difference of you being ten kilos heavier. It’s a game that I’ve played before, and I’ve had injuries that have just come about with losing muscle mass.
I’m at a stage now in my life where I prefer to weight train and actually build strength in an unconventional way, compared to most racing drivers, and that suits me. I do a lot of cardio as well.
Newman: What do you do for cardio?
Mardenborough: Just after the academy, I ran the New York City Marathon. I think I had three months training and they said, okay, you’re going to do all this training in the car and then we want you to run the New York marathon.
That trainer was a bit mad, but they wanted to shift this perception of couch potatoes—not all gamers are like that.
Newman: What parts of the movie were accurate? What did it get right?
Mardenborough: My favorite part was the first 45 minutes, because it really lays out my life and situation back in 2011. When somebody asks you, so how did you get into racing? And then you say, oh yeah, I entered this competition… They can’t understand. It’s quite hard to visualize. That’s why I love that first 45 minutes. I can say now, okay, you want to know—the Gran Turismo movie shows how I got into the sport. That’s why it’s my favorite.
Newman: What pieces would you say are a little less accurate?
Mardenborough: The racing events that are shown in the movie are not necessarily in the right order. After winning the academy in real life, I did a lot of racing all over the place, but you’ve only got two hours 40 minutes to cram in things. The Nürburgring was actually in 2015, and when I placed at Le Mans, 2013. Those things happened, but not necessarily in the right order. I understand why, because otherwise the movie would be four hours long.
Newman: I was told that you had the chance to essentially be your own stunt double in the film. Tell me how that came about.
Mardenborough: The original stunt coordinator, he posed a question to the producers at the time—wouldn’t it be great if he played himself as a stuntman? I think they expected me to say no… and I was like, yeah, that sounds awesome. What a chance, to be able to play yourself in a movie! It’s crazy.
Newman: So how was it?
Mardenborough: When I turned up on set, I spoke to the stunt coordinator. He doesn’t know me directly; he just knows me from the producers. He’s making a film on me, but he doesn’t know me technically. He doesn’t know what I’m like working under pressure.
I was aware that I need to kind of prove to this man, and also the other stunt drivers, that I can work and integrate with them to produce something great, because it’s his reputation as well. So I acted like a sponge, and I loved it. I learned a lot and I’d love to do more in the future. It was such a great time. And all the stunt people, they said it’s the most amount of fun they’ve ever had on a movie set. For it to be to my film, it’s a blessing.
Newman: What was your favorite part of stunt driving?
Mardenborough: The camaraderie. There’s a lot of waiting in the movies, and I was told early on to be prepared. It’d just be the stuff we’d do in the waiting room.
We had these little remote control cars, and we’d set up a track with jumps, and all of us would just be joking around. It’s stuff like that, just the real human connection that we had.
Newman: What was the hardest part?
Mardenborough: Slovakia Ring was the most difficult part of the shoot. We all turned up there, and none of us had raced there before. We’d be racing in, the opposite way around the circuit. And then we are doing it in the dark, and the cinematographer taped up our headlights because the cameras wouldn’t work with the headlights, they had glare.
So we were racing around a track we’ve never been before, in an opposite direction, in the dark, with no headlights—and it was raining. It was really tough, but we had such a great time doing this.
Newman: You’ve said you still play—is that true?
Mardenborough: Yeah, occasionally. I’ve got the new GT7 now, and I’m a PlayStation Playmaker. So PlayStation sends me a lot of new equipment. I’ve got this VR headset now, and I’ve never played VR before, so [I’ve been] spending some hours just for fun. I can spend so many hours where I should do training or do something productive to my actual career.
Newman: Has real-life driving taken over that role in your life?
Mardenborough: Absolutely. It’s difficult to spend hours upon hours, the same amount as I did back in 2011, because I did this because I want to do the real thing. And the real thing is the best thing in the world to me. I only have two real interests in life, and that’s motor sport and women. I wouldn’t change it for the world.
So when I’m playing racing games, I enjoy it for fun, but I can’t spend hours doing it unless it’s for training.
Newman: Do you still use games for training?
Mardenborough: Always. It’s the second-best thing you can do outside of being in a real car. I use it heavily for that when I can’t be in a car simulator. In 2020 I bought myself a rig, it weighs a hundred kilos. It’s made of aluminum, it has the latest and greatest gear on it, and it’s my home-built simulator I use for training.
Newman: What parts of GT prepared you for racing?
Mardenborough: Without Gran Turismo I wouldn’t be where I am. You learn how the racing lines, the tracks, without being there physically.
Newman: What do you say when people ask you how to get into the sport?
Mardenborough: There isn’t a competition like GT Academy to get into racing [any more]. It’s something which I’m looking into, because I feel after the movie, it is possible to do—I’m proof of the pudding. You can actually make a career actually doing nothing in the real car and then using a platform that grants a career in real racing.
So something that I’m looking deeply into is how to change that, how to do something similar to GT Academy. But in my own way. There are a lot of things I would change. Right now there’s nothing out there, but if you want something doing, you have to do it yourself.
Newman: What would you change?
Mardenborough: The best cars to learn how to really develop as a racing driver are single seaters. I made the transition into single seaters after driving GT cars, and in particular a GT car which was very blunt. So when I made the transition from GT to formula cars, it took me a while to retrain my brain to be very delicate in my inputs. That time is wasted, in a way. If I was in formulas first, then went to GT later on, the progression would be better. There are many things, but I don’t want to give too much away because there’ll be somebody out there watching.
Newman: Where do you see your career going?
Mardenborough: Because of the movie, I did all the promotion. I focused on that, because that’s only going to happen once. I enjoyed doing it.
I’m working on acquiring sponsors and talking to race teams. I would love to do some racing in America; to return to Le Mans; and to do some racing in Europe. Up until late [in 2022], I was still with Nissan. Now I’m looking for a manufacturer or a private team. I want to continue this well into my forties.