Kazunori Yamauchi, CEO of Polyphony Digital raced across yesterday, last night and today in the prestigious and incredibly heated Nurgburgring 24 hours endurance race as part of Team World Car Awards, driving the #72 Lexus IS-F (SP8 class) alongside Peter Lyon, Hideshi Matsuda and Owen Mildenhall. .
After round 1 of qualifying with a wet track that obviously produced mediocre lap times for everyone, things started to look dire, as Yamauchi's Lexus suffered from problems to the fuel pump requiring it to be changed, forcing the team to skip qualifying round 2 when the track had dried up. This potentially disastrous occurrence forced the team to start the race in 174th overall position.
Yamauchi and his fellow drivers, though, didn't give up and prepared for a difficult uphill battle. The team immediately looked fast at the start of the race, and started to climb up the rankings. Slowly but surely, during the best part of two days and a night, they overtook a total of 114 cars.
They staged and won many heated duels, like the one around the half of the race against the only Audi R8 in the same class: #49 Alexander Krebs' R8 (quite appropriately, Forza Motorsport 3's cover car is an Audi R8).
In the end they finished this epic race in 60th position overall, managing to grab a 4th position between the twelve teams in their class (In this kind of competition cars of different classes race all together, but have separate rankings due to the obvious differences in power) and brought home a shining performance in conditions that seemed desperate.
It was truly an epic race, for Yamauchi's team and overall. I can't wait to relive it in Gran Turismo 5 (the Nurburgring has been confirmed to be included in Gran Turismo 5 in all it's three incarnations: Nordschleife road track, F1 circuit and the 24 hours track that is an extremely challenging combination of the other two). Also, Congratulations to the other Lexus from Japan, #50 Gazoo Racing LFA, that managed to win the class after an equally epic climb through the rankings. As both Yamauchi's #72 and Gazoo Racing's #50 passed the finish line, the commentator of the race appropriately talked about an historic result for Toyota and Lexus, and Yamauchi-sensei was part of that history.
Again Kazunori Yamauchi demonstrated that he's not just one of the best racing game developers in the world, but also a top class driver in the real world. Let's hope to see him at E3 to finally announce the official release date of Gran Turismo 5!
You can see a couple more pictures of Yamauchi's #72 here and here.
the man is a BEAST
ReplyDeleteWhen someone is passionate about what he does for living ; he'll success no matter what.
ReplyDeleteIt is good to see someone like that in this day and age where every thing is about money making but no passion.
Good article.
I agree. This shows what an incredible person Kazunori is, a man who is not just passionate about cars and motorsports, but about bringing that passion into his marvelous games. And that he understands the principles of motorsports and turn that into the skills necessary to compete with professional race car drivers. And beat them!
ReplyDeleteI know he's Japanese, but still, the way he quietly conveys this prowess and racing authority with such humility demonstrates what a truly great man this is. No one else has a thing to say to The Kaz. ;D