A Driving Passion

No one in HK ever made the transition from videogamer to motorsport until Edgar Lau arrived, who will race at the Macau Grand Prix this month. Nan-hie In reports.

He was a keyboard warrior, the kind of kid parents worry about, a nerd, a computer game addict. Edgar Lau would get up at 4 am to sneak in a few hours, enjoying his obsession for fast cars, racing for the finish line. He’s started with Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed, then graduated to PlayStation’s Gran Turismo. He had to be sneaky. His parents weren’t taking lightly that he was “racing cars” when he s h o u l d h av e been doing his homework, so they took away his game console. Lau got around that by getting his grandmother to wake him at 4, so that he would have three hours of uninterrupted joy, before his parents awoke at 7. “When my parents got up, I’d throw everything aside so they didn’t know I’d been playing for hours,” recalled Lau. Who would’ve believed how all this would turn out? Surely not his parents. Lau is a top ranked driver, who won Class E3 auto racing challenge for real, at 25 Hours of Thunderhill in the United States, in 2014. He took second at the GT series at Pan Delta Super Racing Festival 2016 on the Chinese mainland and he finished fifth overall at the Asian Le Mans Sprint Cup 2016 in Malaysia. He’s headed for the Macau Grand Prix 2016 after being chosen by the Asia Racing Team for the Guia 2.0T race. His parents don’t give him hassles playing video games any more. “They started believing I have some talent in this whole driving thing,” said the 25-yearold. Lau is an enigma to much of the auto racing crowd. He’s the first in Hong Kong to go from virtual racer to actual speed racer on the circuit. People are starting to think maybe video simulations may open doors in a sport notoriously hard to get into. The financial barriers are really steep.

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