If you look abroad, collaborations of the esports and gaming ecosystem with automotive brands may have become commonplace. Esports observers may remember the partnership of Audi with Astralis, Mercedes-Benz with SK Gaming and ESL, Tesla with Peacekeeper Elite (PUBG Mobile China), or Rolls Royce with QQ Speed ​​Mobile (Speed ​​Drifter China).

However, we also had that in Indonesia, albeit fewer. We saw Honda Motor in the ESL Jagoan Series or Renault in the First Warriors tournament. Apart from esports in general, sim racing is the most interesting to collaborate with automotive brands. One of them happened at the end of last week, namely the collaboration between GT-Sim.ID and Prestige Image Motorcars.

Prestige Image Motorcars itself is actually not an automotive brand, but a dealer of imported luxury cars from Europe managed by Rudi Salim, a well-known young entrepreneur. The connection between this business and sim racing is quite close. Therefore on Saturday, September 5 2020, GT-Sim.ID was invited to hold a Sim-Racing competition and celebrate the launch of the latest Prestige Image Motorcars showroom.

“Last week, GT-Sim.ID collaborated with Prestige Image Motorcars to hold a racing simulator event celebrating the launch of Prestige’s newest dealer in Pluit. This could be said as the biggest simulator event we have ever held. There are 15 simulators with around 90 participants consisting of invited guests which are members of luxury car owner communities: BMW ///M Series Owner Community Indonesia, Ferrari Owner Community Indonesia, Porsche Owner Community Indonesia, Lamborghini Owner, and so on.” Said Andika Rama Maulana as Co-Founder of the sim racing team and provider of racing simulation tools, GT-Sim.ID.

“I was shocked by the enthusiasm of the participants yesterday. You can guess how much this community ‘toy’ costs. Even so, they still really like racing using simulators because of the excitement and immersion presented was similar to the original. Interestingly, the members of the luxury car community prefer practical simulator sets to more sophisticated ones at the same price as their cars. The reason is that they just sit and race without having to think about other arrangements.” Rama Maulana continued his story.

“Hopefully, in the future, there will be more events like this. So that the racing sim can be introduced to more people, and even more circles.” closed Rama expressed his hopes for the local sim racing scene.

Indeed, during this pandemic era, esports racing grew quite rapidly, considering that many real races were changed to virtual ones. Let’s hope luxury car owners could become one of the biggest supporters of local sim racing in the future, or perhaps esports as a whole? Who knows.

The original article is in Indonesian, translated by Yabes Elia