Well I got pretty smartly put right on that one as Marinescu, who has personally combined gaming with actual, physical judo throughout his life, maintained that this is not how it works. You do both.

"This is an argument I have heard a couple of times and I don't believe it in any way," he said. "People who say the esports are taking kids away from physical sports I think don't know enough about the market.

"The kids are playing and they will play. It is a $190 billion (£151.5 billion/€169 million) a year business. There is no competition in that sense.

"The big question for collaboration is not to try to protect the base of people that are participating in one or the other activity, to retain them there, to prohibit them from doing something. Because the result will be that they will prefer to do that which they are prohibited from doing.

"The way we need to work is to collaborate in understanding how we can motivate young people, and how we can endorse physical movement as a requirement for kids. And how do we convert kids who play games to the physical activity of sport – to have a better life, and to be happy?"

That balance lies at the heart of his ambition in the role he took up earlier this year. Question – how best to achieve this laudable aim?

Here is one textbook answer. At the centre of it is a 22-year-old Englishman called James Baldwin, who on August 1 to 2 will make his debut in the Intelligent Money British GT Championship at Oulton Park on board a McLaren 720S GT3 for Jenson Team Rocket RJN – the team co-owned by 2009 Formula One world champion Jenson Button.

Here's the thing. Baldwin earned his opportunity by winning an esports competition last year, when he became the world's fastest gamer in simulated motor racing.

He finished ahead of nine other top gamers in the Torque Esports-created competition that was judged by Jann Mardenborough, a former GT Academy winner and British GT race winner, Rudy van Buren, who won the first series of World's Fastest Gamer, and Formula 1, IndyCar, NASCAR and sports car racer Juan Pablo Montoya.

"The point of World's Fastest Gamer is to put a gamer, which is what I am, into a GT car and to give them an opportunity to become a racing driver," Baldwin tells me.

"And to state how unique it is, there's not really a lot of esport that allows that. Call of Duty, for example, the shooting game – you find it very rare that someone from that would go into the army. 

"Or with FIFA, you don't really see players becoming footballers. It's not that transferable. 

"Whereas with sim racing and the world of motorsport the skills are very similar.

"The biggest difference is the physical aspect. Driving a racing car at speed is very, very physical, and the sim racing is not really physical at all. So I have had to train quite a lot to be ready for that. Because this time last year if I was going into a car I probably wouldn't have been ready.

"The other big difference is the money side of it. The cost of it is a lot more in the real world than it is in the sim world. The cost if you crash is financial, and maybe physical. In a simulator you can't really damage yourself or the car.

"But the general motor skills and mentality behind how you drive are the same. I've always played sports – football, a bit of tennis, and I was karting in the real world from the age of eight to 16.

"Then I stopped for four years – for reasons of cost – but I always had the mentality of keeping myself in a good physical state so that if I had the opportunity to start racing again I would be ready. The one thing I was lacking before this year was a bit of muscle, so that's what we've worked on.

"I've been doing general cardio work, circuit training, going on the bike, running. And I have done quite a bit of targeted weight training. The biggest thing to improve for me this year was my legs, especially my left leg.

"Because when you press the brake pedal in a racing car it's very, very tough. So I've been doing endurance training on that leg so that I can hit the brake pedal at the same pressure for an hour and a half straight, because the races we will be doing will be that long.

"It's not been easy but I feel like it's going to pay a dividend when we get on the track."

Baldwin will be swapping driving shifts with McLaren junior driver Mike O'Brien as they contest the Silver Cup within the British GT Championship in a series of six races that start at Oulton Park and will then see them at Donington Park, twice, Brands Hatch, Snetterton and Silverstone.

"Races in Britain tend to be shorter than elsewhere in Europe," he says. "They are about two to three hours.

"The races are at big name tracks, but they are very narrow and almost dangerous because if you go off you're going to hit a barrier. In a car as quick as the McLaren I'll be driving that is kind of a scary prospect, but I think once I get out there I’ll be fine."

So – how quick is the McLaren in fact?

"The top speed is about 180mph," Baldwin replies. "On the test we did earlier this year there was a very long straight and we hit 270kph I think it was. 

"But it's not really the top speed that's the scariest thing in these cars, it's the braking and the acceleration.

"An accident in sim racing is not affecting your reality. You tend to drive better in real life because you know subconsciously that if you make a mistake it is going to hurt a lot more.

"In sim racing it is hard to get that same concentration because if you do go off, I mean – what's the worst that could happen?"

Asked what gaming has brought to him as a racing driver, Baldwin responds: "It's improved me in every area. You can put in thousands of laps, whenever you want, because you are at home doing it. It taught me a lot about car set-up, and it improved my mental approach to everything.

"I would never do sim racing for relaxation. It's a job when you get to the level we are all at. You have to put in six-to-eight hours a day in training for a competition, just so you are on the pace and you get the muscle memory in your body so your body subconsciously knows what to do.

"You need to know the set-up of the car. You need to make sure everything's right. It's very intense.

"I have been doing gaming in the racing industry for three years. Before that I was a casual player – FIFA, Call of Duty, just playing with my mates. I honestly didn't have any idea that this route to GT racing could even be a possibility.

"I started racing gaming in 2018 as a casual thing to give me that fix I missed because I wasn't doing karting any more.

"There are about eight to 10 sim racing games you can play, they are all different but they are all driving. I was walking through PC World with my girlfriend in 2017 when I came across a rig, as we call it, with a wheel and pedal set, and it was £250 ($315/€275), so I thought 'that looks cool. I'll buy that'.

"And when you get online there are all these forums and websites, you just meet people and you get involved with the community and all that, and it builds from there really. 

"Luckily racing esports has boomed, so I got involved.

"World's Fastest Gamer is a unique competition to get a gamer into real life. That's not the norm. The norm in any esports competition is that you qualify online, and then do the final, which normally takes place in an arena in front of an audience. And there are usually cash prizes.

"I drive for a team called Veloce Esports and that is my gaming side of things.

"The most common approach is to do one version of sim racing, and to be a master of it. But when I first went into sim racing I was under some management from Veloce and they said if you are the jack-of-all versions, and you are in the top five in every championship in every different game, you are going to get noticed. So that's what I did.

"But now I am going to focus on one, and that's going to be the F1 Esports series for now."

Baldwin, who is still living in his family home in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, said his parents were "a bit sceptical" when sim racing started to turn from a hobby into something more serious.

"But in 2018 when I won €4,000 (£3,600/$4,500) in my first big competition, they were like 'wow! that could be a potential career'. And they have been very supportive.

"That was an esports competition on a game called Project Cars 2. I qualified online. The top 12 got flown out expenses-paid for the final in Austria. 

"I took my girlfriend with me. There were four races, and I came second overall and that won me €4,000. So at that point it was like 'wow!'"

While Baldwin effectively rules out a prospective career in F1 – "I'm 22, and it will take a few years to establish myself racing in the real world, so I think F1's not really where I’ll end up" – his ambitions are set as high as they could be within the world of top-end sports cars as he targets racing at Le Mans, or on the Indy Car circuit.

A warning to all F1 esports contestants. He also intends to maintain his pre-eminence in the virtual racing world.

World's Fastest Gamer can be entered via mobile, PC or console. Entry can be as simple as downloading and playing Gear.Club on a mobile device https://wfgamer.com/.