#24 - Sim Racing Esports needs to learn from professional Sports | Nina Braack

In this episode we're joined by Nina Braack, Manager Esports at Porsche Motorsport and the woman leading the Porsche Coanda Esports Racing Team, Porsche’s official Esports works squad in international sim racing. With Porsche Esports, she uses Sim Racing to reach a young, tech‑affine community far beyond traditional motorsports, allowing fans worldwide to race Porsche GT cars digitally and experience the brand in genuinely competitive environments. At the same time, she thinks far beyond pure marketing: for Nina, sim racing and Esports are high‑performance sport, where talent, training, tactics and teamwork decide just as much as in real‑world racing.

Nina’s own path into Porsche Esports is deeply shaped by competitive sport. Born in 1993 in Frankfurt am Main, she studied, among other things, sport and event management and spent around ten years playing professional volleyball in the German 1st and 2nd Bundesliga before switching to Porsche Motorsport in 2022. This background in elite sport means she knows first‑hand what it means to train every day, deal with injuries and setbacks, and then at some point make the conscious decision to quit a professional career and reinvent herself, topics we dive into in detail in this conversation. Under her leadership, the Porsche Coanda Esports Racing Team quickly established itself at the top of the field, taking two titles in the Sim Racing top category ESL R1 as early as 2023.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:40 Nina Introduction

02:20 Rennsport R1

03:00 Professional Volleyball career

07:47 Dealing with setbacks

11:50 Quitting Volleyball

13:30 Love for motorsport growing up?

14:30 Getting involved with Porsche

18:40 Porsche Esports

22:50 Joshua Rogers going into a real car in British GT

27:25 Evaluation process

30:10 How Josh reacted to the race weekend

33:25 Sim Racing Esports

45:00 Where do you see Porsche Esports in 5 years time?

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