See a 17-Year-Old Online NASCAR Champ Get His First Real Drive

Michael Conti had a busy 2014. In 16 NASCAR-sanctioned races, from Daytona to Las Vegas, the 17-year-old Conti won three times and led twice as many laps as his nearest competitor. Whether on an oval track or road course, Conti often finished several seconds ahead of a packed field.

And he did it all from his bedroom in suburban New Jersey, after work bagging groceries.

In 2014, Conti won the NASCAR world title in the highly competitive arena of online racing, becoming the youngest person in its history to do so. iRacing is known as the pinnacle of the sport; not a game like Sony’s GranTurismo and Microsoft’s Forza, but a pure racing simulator, with thousands of drivers from around the world running on tracks and cars as detailed as possible.

Despite his passion for online racing, Conti has never driven anything faster than his dad’s 2003 Chevy Impala. Due to the high cost of ownership, Conti doesn’t own a car and hasn’t driven one in more than four months — or at least he hadn’t, until Yahoo Autos took him to Las Vegas Motor Speedway and put him behind the wheel of a real NASCAR for the first time.

Like his racing, Conti’s fame is mostly virtual and largely unnoticed by his classmates at Passaic Valley High School in Woodland Park, N.J: “One day I want people to know me as a real NASCAR driver,” he says, just like his hero, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Conti has raced against Jr. online; Earnhardt, like many pro racers in NASCAR and other series, has an iRacing account and competes regularly to stay sharp and refresh his memory of various tracks. “I beat him a couple of times,” Conti says about racing the two-time Daytona 500 champion: “He beat me. So, it was like a 50/50 split.”

Looking around his bedroom of his mother’s apartment, it’s an all-Chevy affair, with a gold bowtie gracing the hood of every diecast model car on display. The walls are festooned in NASCAR memorabilia – like pictures of Dale Jr. in victory lane, a Budweiser jacket from his childhood and a giant Goodyear blimp hanging from the ceiling above his hand-made computer desk, next to which is his prized iRacing championship-winning trophy.
 
Next, he shows me his racing setup, which even by online standards looks dead simple. Home racing-game controls can run into the thousands of dollars, but Conti uses a $250 Logitech G27 steering wheel and pedals, and his homebuilt PC looks powerful but nothing out of the ordinary. Conti sits in his racing chair, engulfed by three computer screens synced to offer a more realistic, wrap-around view from behind the wheel.

He’s running a few laps on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, the track he’ll be driving in one of the stock cars from the Richard Petty Driving Experience. The engine noise rattles the walls in his mom’s apartment to the point where we worry about aggravating the neighbors: “These speakers are new,” he shouts. “My old ones broke the other day after, like, 12 years.”

For $49.50 a year, iRacing’s users get to practice their skills in conditions that are as close to reality as possible, mimicking everything from Formula 1 to club-spec Volkswagen diesels. Some 70 tracks have been laser-scanned to within millimeters for accuracy, so that even minor bumps are precisely replicated. Many professional racers use iRacing for practice, as I did in the IndyCar series.

For Conti, iRacing is all he knows. He spends 16 hours a week competing against people from all over the world at the sim’s highest level. He’s earned sponsors who put graphics on his Chevy in iRacing’s NASCAR PEAK Antifreeze Series, thanks to the live broadcasts of all his races. Conti’s iRacing team consists of an engineer and crew chief, as well as a spotter; just like real stock cars, drafting and handling setup often determines who wins. During the races, these team members communicate over a headset, deciding strategy calls and race tactics. When he wins, he has media interviews as well as debriefs with his team. “As we always say, the game is a simulation,” he says, “but the racing within the game is real.”

With NASCAR sanctioning the series, Conti can legitimately call himself a NASCAR champion. Winning in 2014 netted the youngster $10,000 from iRacing, and after a personal sponsor forked out a further $5,000, the net haul for the 17-year-old was impressive.

Conti’s love for racing stems from his father. Also a NASCAR and Chevy fanatic, Michael Conti Sr. has spent his life working on cars, and back in his youth, used to drag race a 1969 Chevelle around New Jersey. When his son was just five years old, Conti Sr. bought him the NASCAR 03 video game and taught him about wedge and cross weight, and how these aspects affect the setup of a racecar.

As for Gina Conti, Michael’s mother, she tried to keep her son’s interests diversified: “If it weren’t for my mom, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten into to any other types of sports,” he recalls. “I’ve taken up tennis over the years, but nothing has ever given me the satisfaction that racing has – probably because I’m not very good at any other sports.” Now, mom admits to simply letting her son pursue his passion for racing.

“It’s what he’s born to do,” she tells me.

Yet outside his bedroom, Conti has driven a grand total of two productions cars – the aforementioned Impala and a Saturn Vue – and had a few hours in a go-kart when he was 11, none of which topped 85 mph.

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous,” he admits before the test in Las Vegas. “Going from a reset button to a concrete wall is scary.”

More than any other sport, racing runs on money. To race in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, two steps below the top level Sprint Cup series, drivers need to raise $3 million. To run the Xfinity Series (formerly Nationwide) a winning driver must cough up $5 million, either personally or through sponsors. And these costs usually come after years of expensive time in various lower-tier series, like Legends or ARCA; budgets even in go-karts for a 10-year-old can reach $300,000 a year.

There have been exceptions — which in the past 15 years can be counted on one hand — but generally no amount of driving talent can overcome a lack of cash. Sponsors prefer known drivers and teams at higher levels (even less successful ones) to young, unproven talent at lower rungs. A youngster’s only hope is to find a unicorn-like angel investor or, more commonly, rely upon a wealthy family connection.