Players of the upcoming new World Rally Championship game WRC 9 have the opportunity to put themselves in contention for a real-world Junior WRC drive.
Details have been revealed of how the game will factor into the FIA Rally Star talent search programme announced by the governing body at the start of the year.
WRC 9’s developer KT Racing and publisher NACON have entered into collaboration with the FIA on the project.
The intention is to find the fastest players on the soon to be released WRC 9 game, then train and develop them ready for real world rallying.
WRC 9 will be released in September with the FIA Rally Star DLC to be available in December 2020, and the competition open to all players aged between 17 and 26 years old.
The overall FIA Rally Star programme is a multi-phase selection process in which seven finalists from around the world, including one female competitor, will take part in a training and coaching programme supervised by the FIA.
From there the aim will be to transition them into the Junior WRC.
Those who show potential on the FIA Rally Star DLC will put themselves into contention for that selection process.
“Being innovative and global, FIA Rally Star’s ambition is to develop new solutions allowing young drivers from all over the world to reveal their potential,” said FIA rally director Yves Matton.
“As soon as we introduced the project to the NACON and KT Racing teams, they showed great enthusiasm and we couldn’t have hoped for a better platform than WRC 9 to select the most promising candidates.
“The FIA World Rally Championship brings together fans from every continent, many of them dream to get behind the wheel and our wish is to make our sport more accessible.
“Through FIA Rally Star and its digital version in WRC 9, living this passion is simpler than ever.”
Online qualifiers for the fifth season of the eSports WRC Championship have recently finished, although that series has never focused on trying to bring the quickest virtual drivers into real world rallying.
Despite that, Jon Armstrong was able to get back into real world rallying after winning the 2018 eSports WRC Championship.
He had previously run out of money to continue his real world career so turned to esports instead, but is now back out in Junior WRC.
