Delsea grad chasing racing gig through gaming challenge - Cherry Hill Courier Post
Simulators and video games seem like a hobby to most, but for one South Jersey native, the time spent behind the virtual wheel could yield a real professional racing contract. Max King of Franklinville is one of six U. S. finalists in the running to make the jump from PlayStation’s Gran Turismo 6 to becoming a professional racecar driver for Nissan under the Nissan GT Academy. The competition first began in 2008 and became available to competitors in the U. S. in 2011. The six U. S. finalists will compete with finalists from Mexico, Turkey, North Africa and Australia. To qualify for the GT Academy finals, King faced more than 30,000 other online players throughout the past three months and qualified as a top-20 finalist for the U. S. King, a full-time student and mechanical engineer major at Widener University,... “It was really hard to find time to put into the video game to get a good lap time and even be eligible for Nashville,” said King, who went to the Nashville Motor Speedway on July 14 for a two-day final consisting of four challenges. “I was doing these events, these online time trials in the game at like 3 a. m. , Saturday nights, trying to find any time that I could during the weekends. On the first day of competition in Nashville, all 20 players competed in four rounds of online racing in driving simulators that tallied points for overall finishes. Source: www.courierpostonline.com
