Gamer to racer: Joining the GT team on track
We played at home, practised at GT HQ: now time for the dream — to race for real
The 4-Hour Media Race has become a staple of the Mazda racing calendar, with Mazda building 25 racecars of the latest/current generation specifically and only for it, inviting a host of Japanese media teams from magazines to newspapers, TV and more to compete — with the odd Super GT and F1 driver thrown in for a bit of spice
. . . and occasionally some overseas guests.
So with thanks to Mazda New Zealand, we represented NZ for the first time in this event - with many Japanese keenly telling us how much they loved our country!
What makes the race unique is that it takes 70 litres of fuel to do the four hours flat out; but each team is only allocated 60 litres (40 in car, 20 in a jerry can for the one stop), so there’s a huge component to saving fuel: higher gears, lifting off early and coasting, braking later and relaying the fueluse gauge every lap to the pits via our mobile phone headsets.
Each driver has a maximum stint of 50 minutes, requiring four mandatory pit stops, 60 seconds each, except for the three-minute refuelling stop. Adding to that was our team’s second-place finish in
2022 that awarded us another
210-second pit stop, to be taken within the first 30 minutes, effectively putting us three laps behind, from the start.
The rule is designed to discourage quick teams from winning, such as Tipo magazine which has won 10 times, including
2022, with first place earning a
270-second penalty, third place 150 seconds, and fourth to sixth place,
120 seconds.
Our red, white and blue ND MX5 NR-A (racing version) has a rollcage, racing seat and Bridgestone Potenza RE004 street tyres and race pads. Otherwise, they’re all standard and the same. That also means softly sprung suspension and lots of pitch, dive and roll, along with a fair bit of tyre squeal.
Juha and I are each given three familiarisation laps in practice, while
Yamada has the honour of qualifying — a good thing, given the downpour of rain moments before qualifying. On a drying track, times tumble in the final minutes and almost everyone’s fast lap is their last, except Yamada who spins on the wet line just after the bridge and fails to improve his/our solid 12th place from 21 cars. In a 4-Hour, it’s academic anyway.
At 4pm Peter is in for the rolling race start. Conserving fuel is the key,
as is running our own race. Others shoot off, and around 10 laps in, we pit for the painfully long 3.5-minute pit stop, which puts us four laps down. And that was pretty much our story of the race, always three to four laps behind, and never looking likely for even a top 10.
After 48 minutes, Peter returns to swap to Sakamoto, who puts in a solid session with a few more rpm, moving up a few places (among those of us penalised and laps down, at least), partly thanks to higher revs we’re subsequently allowed due to our lower fuel use.
As dusk nears, it’s my turn for some fun, and though our pit communication (via mobile phone and headsets) has overheated and
ceased working, I’m always in traffic and pass around 10 cars. As night falls, the track is bathed in yellow thanks to the track lights. And in more ways than one. After 30 minutes of driving blind without lap times or position updates, I head down the back straight and pass two cars line-astern . . . just as I do, I notice in the dark distance a rectangular flag, which I assume is yellow — like everything else.
Immediately I raise my hand as
the second-placed Car Graphic MX5 I’d just passed is still behind me and had also passed at least one of those cars. It’s borderline, but also confirmed at the next flag point when the SC Safety Car board comes out and the flashing yellow lights turn on for a car that’s spun off on the final corner, beached in the gravel.
As I enter the start straight, the MX-5 safety car oddly picks up me as the leader, soon waving me by, and gaining us a lap back. I catch the tail of the train and we take the opportunity to do the three-minute fuel stop; but it’s too early for a driver change, so I go back out and catch the tail again of the still slowmoving train, before pitting again for the driver change to Juha: fortuitously, the whole process has got us back one lap. We’re maybe up to 10th. Not long after, we’re told of a one-minute penalty for passing a car past a yellow flag point. Dang. Though the reality is, that pass ultimately netted us 90 seconds.
Not that it mattered too much: while our fuel use was better than target, we just weren’t making up the time we needed to, and were still three laps down as we passed the halfway point with Juha putting in quick and consistent laps, and having fun in the dark rounding up cars and racing with the Tipo team.
Maybe it was the 3.5-minute stop, but we’re actually using less average fuel than the GT simulations suggested, and none of us are getting within one to two seconds of our expected lap times either. The simple answer is, we pick up the revs and go faster.
With Juha pushing hard, he pits with 50 minutes to run, and Yamada climbs in for the final stint, largely unleashed. He rolls off the fastest lap time of the whole race, a 1m:12.8s lap. He’s gaining places, we maybe see ninth, but it’s burning through fuel, and with 10 minutes to go, the fuel light comes on and he’s forced to back off to simply finish.
Tipo runs dry and has to pull to the side of the track, as many teams have done in previous years. Cars are surging, going five to10 seconds a lap off-pace. As the chequered flag waves, Yamada crosses the line out of fuel, parking it 50m past the flag on the track, in front of our garage.
We finish in 13th place, still three laps down and never really able to make inroads. But we finish. Team Engine Roadster takes the win from ninth on the grid, ahead of previous winners and pole-sitter Revspeed, and the third qualifying/finishing 009 MX-5 of Terry Tsuchiya’s TV Car Storys.
From playing Gran Turismo at home, to visiting the GT headquarters in Tokyo (see separate story on p5), then being able to race an MX-5 around Tsukuba with a great team is an experience that few get to realise. I’m no Jann Mardenborough or Lucas Ordonez, but for four hours, we lived the dream of going from gamer to racer.
Special thanks to Mazda Australia, Sony PlayStation NZ, NHK World/Samurai Wheels Japan, Peter Lyon, Polyphony Digital Japan, and C! magazine Philippines, plus all our drivers, team and supporters for making this incredible event happen.