Gamer-to-racer takes on Spa

In a few years time we will know if Matthew Simmons has been truly successful in transitioning from gamer to the reality of being a sought-after professional race driver.

The former Wavell Heights Australia Post contractor spent what amounts to his first anniversary of winning the 2015 Nissan GT Academy by tackling the big daddy of GT3 racing, the Spa 24 Hour, on the weekend.

He didn’t win, after his Nissan GT-R GT3 was smashed on the opaque Balance of Performance rules that slowed it in a straight line, and he wasn’t even the best-placed Australian, after his car lost 12 laps in the pits repairing a fuel-relay issue.

But he ran toe to toe with some of the best professional sports-car racers in the world and held his head high, coped with torrential rain on both slick and wet tyres and matched the pace of his own team’s GT-R Pro car.

When that Pro car happens to be the reigning Blancpain GT Endurance Cup champion, it has to be considered a pretty good benchmark for driving talent.

Fellow Australian Liam Talbot finished ahead of him, and should be applauded for winning the Amateur class with Kessel Racing’s Ferrari 458 after starting racing four years ago, but that’s more than three years longer than Simmons has been at it.

Incredibly, the Spa 24-hour – a race that’s on the bucket list of most amateur club racers – was just his fourth ever race, after debuting in Paul Ricard in May.

And he knows he is lucky, signed to a one-year works contract after winning the GT Academy. For Spa, he was paired with his predecessor, the 2014 GT Academy winner Ricardo Sanchez, the late Tom Walkinshaw’s son Sean and Romain Sarazin.

By far the most competitive racing championship in the world, the Blancpain Endurance series is divided into three classes, Pro, Pro-Am and Amateur. While Pro is full on, Pro-Am, where Simmons drives, demands a mix of Platinium, Gold, Silver and Bronze-licensed racers. The GT Academy has turned out such good walk-up Bronze talent so far that its first winner was poached by another factory team.

If that’s not enough pressure, the Spa 24-hour race is also the second round (after the Bathurst 12 Hour) of the Intercontinental GT Challenge, which finishes in Sebring later in the year.

Like Sanchez before him, the affable Queenslander made it through the filter of PlayStation gaming, then won through an intense week of racing, learning and listening at Silverstone.

Since then, he’s been commuting to and from Europe’s Blancpain Endurance racing events from home and still doesn’t even own a car.

At Spa, Simmons showed he can go head to head with the best in the world in production-based race cars that are far quicker than V8 Supercars around Bathurst, despite being considerably slower in a straight line. They’ve also got traction control and anti-lock braking, and carry a lot of aerodynamic downforce.

“A test at Donington in the dry was my first experience of the full car. I was braking and I had to keep braking later and later,” he admitted.

“The only way to describe these cars is that they’re beyond reality but once you feel it and see how it’s all working and feeling it, then it’s fine.

“In a GT4 car or something like that, you brake where you think you need to brake and the GT-R was the first where I have had to get past that. The braking is not where you believe it should be.”

It’s a transition that he’s so far enjoyed and he’s found more and more confidence with each session behind the wheel of the biturbo V6 racer.

“You have to believe in your own abilities and once you’ve done that, then you have to believe in the car,” he said.

“The big thing for me was at Paul Ricard, when I could just tip it in to the right-hander at the back (off the back straight). It builds confidence to drive wheel to wheel with these guys and feel that I can stay with it.”

It's a big leap to come from sitting in a relatively cheap PlayStation GranTurismo driving simulator at home to flinging an actual factory team car around a racetrack that’s claimed the life of Formula 1 driver Elio d’Angelis. But Simmons said the Academy’s training program made him ready for it.

“Getting up to speed was not too bad because the development of the Academy is very good. It comes together.

“But when you go out there at racing speed you have to develop a level of respect for everyone else and then you have to give yourself the same respect -- that you deserve to be here.

“It was developing feel. The more I feel, the less I think and I was feeling where I was. I am developing into feel so I don’t use reference points and it works out for me. The less I think, the better I drive.”

His mentors in the team and his Academy bosses have been impressed with his quiet confidence, calm demeanour and ability to blend in with the team. While the Dubai 24 Hour is the traditional opener for GT Academy winners, Simmons’ co-driver fell ill on the eve of the race and his coaches thought he’d done enough to warrant a season-long seat in the far tougher Blancpain championship.

He has come to lean heavily on NISMO team leader Alex Buncombe, who is widely regarded as one of the best sports car drivers in the world, along with Walkinshaw.

“I can get more feel out of the car and get more information I can give to them to build a faster race car. I have leaned on Alex for technical stuff a lot. He’s very good.

“I realised but never saw it with my own eyes, so to see it and appreciate how hard the mechanics work, I really bond with them over a race weekend.

“That’s what I love about team racing.”

The other hugely helpful ear to chew on within his own team is Sanchez, who was on Simmons’ path just a year earlier.

“He told me what to expect and how to transition into the second year. His idea is that you come to a track that you have been to before and you remember what you have achieved and you feel like you can deliver,” Simmons explained.

“For me a lot of this year was having feelings of pressure and the biggest thing he said was to remember to enjoy it. You are learning so much mentally and we can get lost in that, so enjoy the moment.”

There weren’t a lot of those moments to enjoy at Spa, though, with both the Balance of Performance (meant to even up the playing field and leave each car with about the same lap speed) dropping the Nissan down to 60th in qualifying, then mechanical problems and severe rain hampering his progress.

Still, in his four stints he successfully coped with situations and conditions that have brought many highly experienced drivers undone, such as stretching full wet tyres across and entire hour-long stint or running on slick tyres in heavy rain.

“That last stint, I had to search for the wet water to keep the tyres cool. It started raining again around the back and I was told I had to manage the tyres for the whole stint and it was trying.

“All of the stints had full-course yellows – yes, I was that guy,” he joked.

“I had rain in three of them, the third was enough to stay with full wets. I had one stint that was almost all behind the safety car.

“I didn’t get any dry running to push as hard as I wanted because it was full course yellow or safety car and then the peak of the tyre has disappeared.”

For one happy period, both the Pro and Pro-Am Nissans were running together in the wet, then on the drying track on wet tyres, before the Pro car’s Hewland gearbox failed.

“It was a bugger [the 23 car failing] for the team and also for me because me and him were together for a while. It was a gauge for me to see how we were going.

“I was catching at times and he was pulling away other times. We were both just trying to manage our tyres to the end of that stint.

“I had some good battles at the start when the safety car departed. Everyone was having their first drive out there and the tyres were cold, but then you had the faster guys trying to come through while we were fighting slower guys.

“I was quicker in the rain on the second stint, so I improved. It’s just good that we are moving forward.”