- Ashley Oldfield emerges as overall winner for 2013 South African GT Academy
- Driver Development Programme to culminate in international motorsport license and professional racing career
(Rosslyn, South Africa, 29 August 2013) – Ashley Oldfield has emerged as the overall winner of the Nissan and PlayStation® GT Academy in South Africa, out-performing thousands of South African hopefuls, embarking on a professional racing career. GT Academy, which saw the country’s top eight virtual racers travel to Silverstone in England for Race Camp, singled Oldfield out as the best of the bunch.
Having recently celebrated his 29th birthday, Oldfield is now involved in a host of motorsport events in England in order to rack up enough credibility to earn his international racing license – the key to his future as a professional racing driver. Stationed near the Silverstone race track in the UK, Oldfield now shares a house with other winners of various GT Academy events, including winners from Germany, Belgium, Qatar, Russia and the United States, and is now on the rise to racing stardom.
Past winners of GT Academy have gone on to race at Le Mans and, says Oldfield, there are high hopes for the future. “Le Mans is the ultimate for any racing driver and I hope to one day find myself on the grid. I visited the 2013, 24 Hours of Le Mans event and to see it all in real life was exceptional – it’s the halo event of international motorsport.”
A former motoring journalist at topCar magazine, Oldfield also remarks that he entered GT Academy to win it from the very beginning. “I remember racing Lucas Ordoñez – a past GT Academy winner who has finished on the podium at Le Mans – at the media launch last October and I thought if I could beat him in karting I might be able to win GT Academy and join him on the international stage if I put my mind to it.”
Johan Kleynhans, Director of Sales, Marketing and Aftersales at Nissan South Africa, says: “We are of course extremely proud of Ashley who has done a stellar job of representing South Africa and we foresee great success for him in the future. He exhibited the right qualities for an international motorsport driver from the beginning and we have faith that he will take all the valuable skills he is learning along the way to great heights with Nissan in motorsport.”
Concludes Oldfield: “GT Academy is an incredible concept and brings an entirely new angle to motorsport – something only Nissan is doing. With such a wide spread of talent available but the financial implications that international motorsport imposes making it very difficult for anyone to crack the nod these days, Nissan’s initiative opens the doors for anyone, no matter what their background or occupation. Literally anyone could be next!”
