A PlayStation gamer who spent hours honing his Gran Turismo 5 skills has fulfilled the dream of probably every kid (or adult) that ever played it.

Jann Mardenborough, a 19-year-old from Cardiff, has gone from armchair racer to Dubai 24 Hour race podium finisher in a mere six months. He won Sony's GT Academy competition back in June, in which the best Gran Turismo 5 players on PlayStation 3 were invited to race virtually for a chance to forge a real racing career.

Now, winning the competition is one thing - but to then have the skills to beat some of the world's best racers in real life...even he probably couldn't have imagined that sort of ending.

GT Academy began in 2008 and has already found a handful of successful racers, but Merdenborough's rise to success has been surprisingly rapid; the competition's first winner, Lucas Ordonez, is now a professional endurance racer with Nissan in the LMP 2 class.

Mardenborough (second from left in the picture above) beat 90,000 competition entrants in the 2011 European GT Academy and has spent the last six months with the American winner, Bryan Heitkotter, preparing at a brutal Silverstone boot camp.

Before being able to compete in the Dubai race, Mardenborough had to compete in a series of smaller races to obtain his pro racing licence, all the while being put through a harsh fitness and driver training regime by Nissan.

Driving in a race-prepared Nissan 370Z shared with Heitkotter and the two previous GT Academy winners, Ordonez and Jordan Tresson (2010's champion), the racing quartet finished third in class and 26th overall in Dubai. The team completed 532 laps of the Dubai Autodrome track, and didn't sustain any major car damage.

Le Mans is in Mardenborough's sights next - he's hoping, like Ordonez, to compete in a Nissan at the legendary endurance race within the next couple of seasons.

Mardenborough, who called Dubai "without doubt the weekend of my life," said: "The only thing that compares to it is winning GT Academy last June. It feels like pure joy. This is just the first step for me and now I hope that my performance in Dubai can take me further."