The closest most people ever come to being a champion race car driver like Jeff Gordon or Max Verstappen is through playing video games. Jann Mardenborough is one of the lucky few to go from making laps on a simulator to competing on some of the most famous tracks in the world.
The British 31-year-old’s unlikely path from gamer to real-life racer is the subject of the new movie Gran Turismo, based on the popular Playstation series of the same name. The movie—which is now streaming on Netflix and stars Archie Madekwe as Mardenborough, Orlando Bloom, and David Harbour—tells a dramatized version of how a teenaged Mardenborough beat more than 90,000 players around the world in the 2011 GT Academy to become a professional driver.
Here’s what you need to know about Mardenborough’s unlikely rise and how the film takes creative liberty with one of the most horrifying moments of the racer’s career.
Early Racing Dreams
Whereas his father, Steve, was a former professional soccer player, Jann dreamed of holding a steering wheel from an early age. He grew up in Cardiff, Wales, and when he went to a local go-kart track at age 8 with Steve, he even impressed the track’s owner.
But within three years, the track closed down, and Mardenborough gave up racing because it was too expensive. “I didn’t do any karting, I didn’t know anyone in motorsport,” he said in a 2016 interview with Car Throttle. “So it became just a dream, just a goal which is so unachievable.”
Described by his mother as “quite a home boy,” the shy Mardenborough instead retreated to his bedroom to play Gran Turismo. Unlike other arcade-style racing titles, the game series—which debuted in 1997 for the original Playstation console—is meant to accurately simulate the look and feel of driving a race car. On modern consoles, the experience is almost photorealistic.
This was Mardenborough’s only outlet to live out his racing dreams until age 19, when Nissan and Sony Computer Entertainment’s GT Academy would change his life forever.
Proving His Skills on the Track
Mardenborough entered the hybrid gaming-driving competition, which offered a contract in the 2012 Dubai 24 Hour race to the winner. The first six weeks were completely virtual, with players asked to lay down their fastest laps on Gran Turismo 5. Mardenborough, who had a simulator rig complete with pedals and a steering wheel, said he played as much as five hours a day. By the end, he advanced as the 11th ranked player in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
In the next round, Mardenborough drove an actual car at the Brands Hatch circuit in southeast England. He was one of two participants to advance to the final portion at Silverstone, which hosts the annual Formula 1 British Grand Prix. After more cuts were made, he was one of only four drivers left to compete in a winner-take-all race on the Silverstone circuit. “The only time I thought I’d have a chance of winning was when I qualified first,” he told Car Throttle. “It was just impossible. You don’t think about that stuff.”
Sure enough, he won and moved to Silverstone for a six-month development program to earn his international driver’s license. Mardenborough quickly proved his success wasn’t a fluke by finishing third in class at both the Dubai 24 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans—arguably the world’s most prestigious auto race—a year later in 2013.
Since then, Mardenborough has competed in various racing series, including Formula 3, GT3, British GT, and Super GT. “The downforce, the G-force, the vibrations—it’s intoxicating bliss for me,” Mardenborough told The Irish Times in a recent interview. “Your body takes a pounding. Your heart rate is a minimum of 150 beats per minute. And it stays at that rate for hours. And you can burn 1,000 calories in two hours. It’s not just sitting down and driving. You are really wrestling a machine.”
The Crash at Nürburgring
While the Gran Turismo movie focuses on Mardenborough’s discovery and development, it also features an infamous accident involving the driver. In March 2015, Mardenborough was competing in a GT3 sportscar at Germany’s Nürburgring Nordschleife course when his car became airborne and flew over safety barriers. Multiple spectators were injured by the car and flying debris, and one person died in the accident.
Mardenborough, who was shockingly uninjured, called it “the darkest moment of my personal and professional life” and implored director Neill Blomkamp to include it in the film. The crash is depicted, but early screenings revealed it’s shown out of chronological order—more specifically, prior to his impressive run at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2013—for narrative effect.
Despite this significant change, which Polygon reviewer Oli Welsh called a “tasteless reframing of a fatal event,” Mardenborough continues to stand by the scene’s inclusion. “The producers and the writers made sure, and I made sure, that it was meticulously done correctly,” he told Daily Express US. “And the movie does a really good job at representing that. Not only the way it happened but also the aftermath. Because it was like that.”
Watch Gran Turismo on Netflix
Watch Archie Madekwe put the pedal to the metal as Jann Mardenborough in Gran Turismo, which also stars David Harbour as his trainer.
Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.
