Interview with Darren Cox, Director, Global Motorsport, Nissan

How much have you had to change the game to suit your need for this challenge you have set up here?

Not at all. The only thing we do is put a structure in place so that people can progress through the game. Other than that everything is exactly the same. What is great for me is, the cars the GT Academy winners drove last year are in this game. So GT6 [Gran Turismo 6] you see a car with all the branding and the drivers names, so it was in the real world last year, now it’s back in the virtual world. So we keep having this loop so we haven’t had to change the game. But in fact we are forcing the game to be changed to add our cars that we race are going in the game so that’s a lovely circle of life.

Video games have come a long way and are getting more and more realistic these days. A man with no flying experience can land a plane with only experience from a game and a joystick, what about in the automotive industry? Where are simulators being used, and how far can one get with just a simple video game?

They are getting closer and closer all the time. The vehicle dynamics of the cars are incredible. I’ll give you an example. Jann Mardenborough, he drove a very difficult circuit called Oulton Park in the UK. It was raining and it was his first time in the GTR. He came in 5^th fastest among 30 cars in the wet against pros. So someone asked him: “how did you know what the wet lines were?” as we know in motor racing, the wet and dry lines are different and he said without a flinch “well I’ve driven it in Gran Turismo”. He had an expression that said “Are you stupid? I’ve driven it in Gran Turismo. So I know how to drive it”. So for me that was another tipping point. I realised these guys are really learning from that. If you listen to these guys who play online a lot, they talk about a motor racing driving would normally talk about. They talk about pitch sensitivity; they talk about roll, about yaw and set-up, caster and camber, and you listen to them and think they are learning to be a racing driver. Not just by turning the wheel and pushing the pedals, but they are also learning to set the car up. So you hear them say things like “if the car dives down then I’ll need stiffer suspension in the front so  ill increase the front spring rating” and this guy has never driven a [Racing] car before. How can he understand that? Of course you don’t feel the G-forces. But other than that its al realistic as it can be and it goes to the point that why would formula one teams invest so much money into simulator technology like they have done? That’s the reason why Ferrari aren’t at the front anymore, because testing was pulled away and everything was done in the virtual world. Redbull have done a good job with that, and I think they are about to build their fourth simulator now. So, If they are right, well they must be right, because Redbull spends multi million dollars on a simulator if they didn’t think it was close to the real thing.

What does the future hold for video gaming technology in aspects other than entertainment?

What’s interesting is that we were talking about the road safety activity that Nissan India do, and also something similar in China, they use simulators. It’s not as advanced as Gran Turismo, but it’s to teach people how to be safe whilst driving on the road. I saw a video, there was a magazine, and there was this two year old, who was waving his hand over the magazine and he can’t understand why it’s not flicking the pages over because he thinks it’s an iPad. So if you look at the digital world, we can’t comprehend how it’s changing and what’s interesting is at the next stage we will be where we talk about Google Glasses with fully integrated technology with head gear and wearable technology will take it to the next level. So I think it’s not just about driving, there are number of other ways we can use gaming technology to help young people, students, old people as well, to learn new skills.

Do you see normal people giving driving tests or learning how to drive and training with similar technology around the world?

Absolutely, it should be part of the driving tests in certain emerging markets. What was interesting, where in my opinion, the greatest race in the world: Le Mans, if you were a rookie driver, you had to drive a simulator before you drive on the Le Mans circuit. So this is the oldest race, the organisers of Le Mans are a very conservative organisation; they decided that they wouldn’t let someone drive on their circuit unless they had simulator experience. The funny thing about that was Mark Webber had to go and complete the rookie test on the simulator before he was allowed on the circuit at Le Mans. So it proves that there is something in it. So if they make someone of that skill level go through a process in a virtual world, then it must work.

Would simulators pave way for car performance development before any physical part of the car is created?

They already are… Nissan use simulator technology to develop cars, Racing Cars and Road Cars. All across the world, but I don’t think it’s happening in India but soon they will do. Technology is becoming more accessible with time but if you look at the work we did on the GT-R Nismo road car, I’d say 90pc of it was done on the simulator and using CFD [Computational Fluid Dynamics] as well. So it’s already happening.

 I’d like to congratulate you for the success that Nissan had recently as Nissan powered cars achieved 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th in LMP2 in LeMans, the experimental ZEOD RC retired very early in Le Mans after hitting 300km/h on the Mulsane straight and Nissan finished 13^th in class at the Nurburgring recently. How do you feel about that?

At LeMans, our GT academy driver should have won. We were leading with 2 hours to go, but a spark plug failed, which is unfortunate. The ZEOD, it feels painful because we didn’t complete enough race mileage that we wanted to, but we did actually achieve our objectives which were over 300km/h on the Mulsane straight, remember this is a car that’s designed to go around corners, not one that’s designed to go straight. So we can go a lot faster than that and we will do and another objective was to complete a lap of Le Mans, 8.5 miles on electric only in a car that was also carrying a petrol engine and we did that aswell. We can go a lot faster so we did a 4:22 min lap, if you see in the video there was an Aston Martin in our way so we would have atleast saved 5 seconds there so we could probably get it down to 4:04 mins on a clear lap. So we were ready to do all that during the race but unfortunately a traditional old fashioned part, a gearbox shaft, broke and it didn’t allow us to go any further. It something you would expect on any car, it was just a bad batch from our supplier, and it broke and unfortunately we couldn’t get the car back and that was the end of it which was massively disappointing because the car had potential to do a lot more and we will demonstrate that EV technology can be exciting, and the car is clearly innovative.

Talking about the Nurburgring, we are racing guys at Nismo so unless we are not winning, we are not happy. The Nurburgring, we haven’t been there for many years in racing, as you know we develop a lot of our cars there because it’s so hard and we had an international driver line-up with Japanese, German, English and Spanish drivers and we were on for top 6 finish and we had some bad luck with one of our cars had a puncture on the third corner and basically lost two laps because of the damage to the car that was caused. So we had some bad luck but we will be back there next year with hopefully better results.

 So when would the ZEOD feature again on the race track, possibly in the next round of WEC in Austin or anytime in the rest of the season?

No way. No. Maybe some time this year. But we are going to do some challenges like Electric Land Speed Record. We want to show what it can do on a shorter circuit, so maybe Silverstone we will go for a lap. Because you’ve only got a certain amount of petrol in the tank, as it [power] would be in a battery, if you try to stretch it all over 8.5 miles you can’t pull all the petrol out at the same time. In Silverstone, you can almost double the amount of petrol you can pull out as is the same from the battery so that what we want to do, run it on a short circuit and see how fast we can go.

Nissan and Renault Alliance are already in Formula 1, and Honda is coming back from next year, could we see Nissan also enter independently? What is up and coming with Nismo in the future?

Within the group, as you mentioned, Renault have been a fantastically successful engine supplier in Formula 1, Infinity our partners and Technology partners with RedBull Racing have shared 4 championship wins with them, so in term of the alliance between Renault, Nissan and Infinity, we’ll let them sit in Formula 1. We [Nissan] have just announced that we are going back to LMP1 after the success in LMP2 with the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th so we have decided to go and play with the big boys to race against Porsche, Audi and Toyota and we going to try and win Le Mans over all so that’s a big challenge for all of us. And maybe we will have some GT Academy drivers driving some of those cars.   

(This interview was conducted on June 29, 2014)