Code master makes it to Visa Vegas eRace

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Code master makes it to Visa Vegas eRace

Profile of David Greco, one of the 10 sim racers to qualify for the Visa Vegas eRace

Code master makes it to Visa Vegas eRace

“In a real car you drive with all your body, in a simulator, even if you have all the motion platform stuff, to be fast you only drive with your eyes. In your eyes, you need all the five senses.”

These are the thoughts of David Greco, one of the four sim racers to have already secured a place in the million-dollar Visa Vegas eRace through his results in Cloud Sport’s Road to Vegas Challenge. Greco is uniquely qualified to discuss this, because not only has he been one of the top sim racers of the past 15 years, he’s also raced karts and cars at an international level in Brazil, the US and Italy, but for a day job he works at Codemasters, where he’s part of the team that creates the highly-successful Formula 1 console game franchise.

“I closely work with the physics coder and I tune the cars, I do the handling of the cars,” he says. “It’s more like a virtual test driver/engineer because I need to also know the data that I put in and make sure that they work as they are supposed to work.”

Although Greco is part of the F1 project, his Italian heritage has also been used in one of their other titles… “In Dirt: Rally I gave the voice to the Italian co-driver, and it was quite funny because when my dad played it he was turning around thinking that it was me talking!”

Like all aspiring racing drivers, Greco started off karting, which he did in Brazil as a teenager starting in 1999. He made the move to single-seaters, initial in Brazil in Formula Ford 1800, before moving to the States, where he took part in the Skip Barber Racing School. But as is the case for so many young drivers, a shortage of funds brought his on-track dreams to a close. The nascent days of sim racing, gave him an opportunity to fulfill his passion for driving, however.

“I started with offline races that you had to upload the results in the early 2000s and before that Grand Prix Legends in the late 1990s,” he recalls. “The first online race was with rFactor with one of the demo cars they had, it was a fantasy car. I remember I was right away on the pace with the best drivers in the world, I was already topping the world records and the leaderboards, I’ve always been there in the sport.”

But while he’s been at the top of his game, the world of sim racing has never had anything like the Visa Vegas ePrix before. Just by qualifying, Greco has assured himself of a minimum of $20,000 in prize money, comfortably more than he would usually make in a season of sim racing ordinarily.

“In my life I’ve never made that much money in sim racing, to do it in one event is amazing! And you know the fact that you get $20,000 really takes the pressure off. It’s something for example at the beginning of the year I wasn’t expecting so I was like ‘wow, beautiful’ it’s like a bonus! But obviously I want to do well, so my aim is always to be top five, when I’m top five of something I know I’ve done well, and when I see I’m in the top five I can push even more and be in the top three and who knows?”

To scoop the top prize of $200,000, Greco will not only have to beat the 20 Formula E drivers, but nine of the other top sim racers. He believes that it will be the sim racers who offer up the stiffest competition for the top prize.

“I honestly think that if there are no crashes and stuff, probably the 10 sim racers will be the top 10,” he reckons. “I’ve met a few drivers like Stoffel Vandoorne – he did a race for my team and he won it! – so I know him and he’s able to be fast in real life and in sim racing, so I don’t know if the Formula E drivers can make this switch, but if they can see this difference they can fight with us, if they cannot, they will be slower than us.

“I know more or less all of the guys who signed up for the tournament and obviously I know more or less all of the guys at the Redline team. And I knew they were going to be the main competitors so that’s no surprise how competitive they are. We are all very competitive, some people are even spending £5000 on equipment, it’s crazy. In the beginning it wasn’t so competitive, but in the last five years it has grown up a lot and it’s super competitive.”

On Sunday, December 4, the remaining six qualifiers from the Road to Vegas Challenge will be confirmed and the line-up for the Visa Vegas eRace, which takes place at CES in Las Vegas on January 7 will be complete.

You can see how the final battle for a guaranteed $20,000 plays out here at 16.30 (GMT) on Sunday, December 4