Ranking iconic gaming characters by their chances of winning Le Mans

It’s that time of year again. As the WEC’s finest machinery assembles at the Circuit de la Sarthe and laps the famous layout at speeds that shrink its 8.4 miles down to karting track proportions, it’s hard not to feel – well, a bit left out.

Deep down, we all suspect ourselves capable of driving to a stunning Le Mans victory, and what’s especially appealing about that shower thought is the certainty that it’ll never be disproven. What’s even harder to disprove, though, is the utterly abstract concept of strapping in a gaming icon and assessing their chances of taking the win, based on, er…

No no no, absolutely not. While at first glance he might seem ideally positioned to translate his credentials as ‘notoriously fast eulipotyphla’ to on-track performances, the fact is that Le Mans Prototypes are designed to be driven while seated, and maintaining this position for extended stints would cause unbearable agony for Sonic given that his back is made of needles. This would also create a hazard for his co-drivers when swapping seats, and safety must take priority. 

We know Sonic has a passionate and fiercely protective community, but we simply can’t look past this fundamental incompatibility. Sonic ranks last.

If we’re talking about stamina, a game character who’s been around since 1980 deserves at least a passing mention. Most protagonists would be thoroughly sick of chasing after little white spots and being chased by ghosts by now, but given that Pac-Man finds a way to re-release himself as a new ‘remastered collection’ almost hourly, that’s clearly not the case here.

However, the cold, hard truth of the matter is that no one’s sure what Pac-Man actually is, and that makes it impossible to imagine the logistics of even getting him into a Le Mans prototype and ensuring he can reach the wheel and pedals, let alone racing to a decent competitive standard. We’re talking about a sentient yellow circle here. Stop being silly. 

It’s bad news for fans of shooting monkeys and figure-hugging expedition attire: we don’t fancy Lara’s chances as a WEC competitor either.

Although her later instalments handle much more compliantly, for most of her life Lara Croft has had the turning circle of a wardrobe and guiding her along even simple corridors felt like performing keyhole surgery with a PlayStation 1 pad. And did you ever get her to drive the boat in that Venice level from Tomb Raider 2? Yeah, good luck round the Dunlop chicane with those deft inputs.

Gaming’s own Dan Ticktum has undeniable physical prowess, and could probably shoulder press a Ferrari 499P and run it around the track above his shoulders as quickly as he could drive it.

However, we’re talking about a character famed for going to extreme and ruthless ends to enact vengeance on all who slight him. A guy who rips the key off a ship captain’s neck and kicks him into the jaws of a hydra, and then double-kills the captain’s soul again in a subsequent game. At no point did the captain even shoot Kratos a hard glance. 

It’s just hard to see how he’s going to get around turn one without a race-ending incident, much less stay on the good side of the stewards for an entire 24 hours.

“Hoo boy! This thing’s fast!”

Understood Nathan. Positive deltas this phase please.

“They should call this place the Circuit de la awesome sauce!”

Copy that.

“Who left that chicane there?!”

Haha. Do try to concentrate please, Nathan.

Link lies somewhere in the middle of this empirical hierarchy, not because his pace is likely to be mid-pack but because he’s so difficult to assess. On one hand, he demonstrates both instinctive driving skills and a sound understanding of automotive engineering in Tears of the Kingdom which would surely come to the fore over the full span of the iconic endurance race. He’s also an able competitor during his unlikely cameo in Mario Kart 8.

On the other hand, he also has a proclivity for going off and doing his own thing for many hours, regardless of how world-endingly pressing the task he’s been entrusted with may be. Ganon is literally planning to dominate the entire kingdom, Link. Is now really the time to refine your vegetable kebab recipe?

That, along with his tight-lipped comms approach, means we simply can’t trust him to stay on task and keep plugging away with competitive lap times for a full stint. A real shame.

Another tricky character to pin down. In the pros column, as a young child she survived countless combat encounters with survivalists, furious mushrooms and falling buildings and remained impressively unphased throughout. A multi-car pile-up would barely raise her heart rate, after the things she’s seen. Her guitar playing would also provide a soothing garage atmosphere, so there’s that.

In the cons: she has a small sliver of that Kratos-like lust for vengeance which may cause some steward-troubling overtakes or over-zealous, Fernando Alonso-style overtakes which redefine track limits.

Speaking of the great Alonso, there’s a striking quote of his during a particular podcast appearance in which he describes his approach to racing as ‘executing as a robot’. And who exemplifies that approach better in gaming than cyborg raconteur and Warthog terroriser, Master Chief?

Master Chief is not a robot. His precise anatomy under that familiar green armour is unclear, but it’s not quite human. Neither is his reaction to stressful and traumatic events, in which he finds himself roughly every 40 seconds. He simply thinks of a cool deadpan line, vocalises it with all the inflection of a tranquilised Jack Dee, and continues along his way.

We feel sure this will yield results over the course of a full day and night of racing. As such, we’re willing to look past the millions of times Master Chief has written off a Warthog Jeep.

Definitely not Mario. Too obvious. Too cheerful. No, instead it’s someone from the Mario Kart roster who often flies under the radar. Who makes you think twice before firing that red shell, because it would seem a bit unkind. It’s Princess Peach.

With those cutesy voice lines, her approach to racing seems so earnest, it’s impossible not to feel a pang of guilt for launching her into orbit with an item. And yet how quickly we forget when it’s Peach herself behind the blue shell that orchestrates our downfall within sight of the finish line.

Like Alex Albon, she’s an agent of chaos masquerading as pleasantness personified, able to pick her way through a wreckage of her own making without putting a target on her exhaust. That’s a skill that will serve her well around the Circuit Bugatti.

Mystic supersoldier and LMP-spec hypercar isn’t a logical match. But the more we think about it, the more we’re convinced that Metal Gear Solid’s various and confusingly similar protagonists could absolutely win at Le Mans.

For starters, few game protagonists display levels of patience or stamina akin to Big Boss’s. Anybody who can prevail in that legendary sniper battle against The End in MGS3 surely stands a decent chance over a 24-hour endurance race, and that’s before we even factor in all those times we made Big Boss drive a Jeep at full speed through the desert while ducking down into the footwell.

He’s also perfectly happy to subsist on unspecified ‘rations’ over the course of his deployments, which is a real mark of the man’s stamina, and his aptitude for radio communication simply can’t be called into question.

If there’s any small blotch – and it’s barely a smudge, really – on his otherwise gleaming application, it would be the likelihood that upon winning he’d force us to watch four and a half hours of cutscenes revealing that Alpine was actually FOXHOUND, all the pit mechanics had been replaced by AI and that the whole event was a giant conspiracy in which both a ghost and a giant nuclear mech were somehow involved.