Meet the Man Who Turned Video Games into a Real Racing Career

For me, video games like Forza are an easy way to lose hours in front of a TV screen and ceremoniously lighten my colleague Henry Phillips’s wallet after hours at the office. For Glenn McGee, racing games were an innocent keystone of friendly hangouts, then an obsession, and are now the bedrock of his professional career. McGee worked up the ranks of iRacing, the online simulator, and its racing league, competing in and winning regional and national championships, sometimes with more than $30,000 on the line. He eventually earned himself the iRacingMX-5 Cup world championship, and with it an invite from Mazda to go head-to-head with other sim racers — in a real race car — in the Battery Tender Global MX-5 Cup.