From Gran Turismo video game to Le Mans, a Hong Kong boy racer’s story
Edgar Lau, fresh from a fifth-place finish in the LMP3 series at the famed Le Mans circuit, talks about how he honed his motor-racing skills playing video games and on reality TV
I was born and raised in Hong Kong, in Sha Tin. I went to a really good secondary school, Diocesan Boys’ School. My dad was a salesman and my mum helped out with my grandfather’s trading company. I’d always played racing games, learning the fundamentals. In 1997, when I was five or six, the first Gran Turismo computer game came out. We only had Need for Speed before that, set on wide open US roads. Now you were on a circuit – and you actually had to brake.
Driving School There’s really no way to get into racing in Hong Kong: you have to be a second-generation racing car driver. The whole racing thing started for me when I finally got my driver’s licence at 19, when I went to the US for college at San José State University. I started studying engineering and, because of racing, I changed to psychology, because it’s less work. I still haven’t finished, because racing has taken up so much time. The prices to go to a race school were a couple of grand a weekend, US. I couldn’t afford that.
So I started marshalling at the race tracks in San Francisco, and being a pit lane fireman. I wanted to dip my foot into it, to see if there was a way I could get through cheaply. I was the pit refueller and also the crew chief for a team on an endurance race, the 25 Hours of Thunderhill, and so in 2012 they rented the car to me for a really low rate for drivers’ school.