Race teams always look up and down the motorsports ladder to identify rising stars. But Formula One world champion Max Verstappen sees untapped potential in the virtual world.
Sim racing is more than a video game; it’s a career path in the competitive esports world filled with championships, Formula One teams, and the potential to drive in real life. The two worlds are fairly similar, Verstappen saying in a recent Team Redline video that, “It’s like 90 to 95 percent there but that five percent is mainly just that real touch, you strap yourself in the car and the G-forces.”
It’s a world that Verstappen knows well. He made headlines during the first half of his latest world championship campaign for his stints of sim racing that clashed with Formula One weekends, like when he won the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix after his team took first in the virtual Nurburgring 24-hour race or the controversy around the Hungarian GP weekend.
Every once in a while, fans will post on social media how the four-time world champion is competing in the virtual world. And he doesn’t shy from sharing his love for the competition or his goal of creating a team that merges sim racing with physical racing.
“Everyone always thinks that it’s just a game and it’s fun, easy going,” Verstappen told The Athletic, “but I would say the competition is just as hard, or even harder, to nail — to win — than in real life.”
Verstappen’s taste for motorsports came from his family legacy and jumping into a go-kart at a young age. But he, like many kids, did gaming on the side, initially starting on a controller. By the time he got a simulator in 2009, the Dutchman already had multiple national karting championships to his name.
Time was limited.
“I never really had time to spend a lot of time on the simulator because combining school (and) go-karting, it was not possible,” Verstappen said. “From 2009 until like 2015, I did a bit but just for fun, to go on with my friends and have a good time.”
There was even a stretch when he stopped racing on the simulator for fun for a few years as he focused on his motorsports career. In 2015, Verstappen joined the F1 grid full-time, racing for Toro Rosso (now known as Racing Bulls) at 17 years old before jumping to Red Bull Racing the following season. He raced for Toro Rosso for the first four grands prix weekends in 2016 before being promoted to the senior team — and he won that first race with Red Bull.
Around the same time, Verstappen began taking his sim racing a bit more seriously, and his passion for it continued to grow.
Max Verstappen features at the global final of Player 0.0 sim racing competition hosted at the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Alexander Scheuber/Getty Images for Heineken)
“I did it for a little bit, and then I realized, ‘OK, this is actually a lot of fun when I’m surrounded by really good drivers, and I want to try and be good at it as well,” Verstappen said. “And then, step by step, you get the right gear, you get the right advice from the drivers (on) how to build up your sim, what you need. That was definitely very helpful.”
In 2015, he joined Team Redline, one of the most successful professional sim racing teams. In the two decades since it was founded by Dom Duhan, Team Redline sim racers have brought home numerous individual and team championships across different games.
As technology advances, digital car racing replicates many aspects of real-world motorsports, like navigating tire wear and adjusting setups. Sim racing has turned into a sport of its own, with car manufacturers and professional motorsports teams either backing drivers or creating teams. F1 created its own program in 2017 involving the F1 video game, and all 10 teams compete in the F1 Sim Racing World Championship. As time passed, these two parts of Verstappen’s life became more intertwined.
“I keep myself busy with doing the same thing as in real life, working on setup, strategy, racing, pit stops, all these kinds of things,” Verstappen said, when discussing why he loves sim racing. “It is becoming more and more professional every single year.”
Sim racing arguably isn’t for the faint of heart, if they’re trying to make a professional career out of it. In F1, practice time is limited, with just three practice sessions on a standard, non-sprint weekend. However, sim racers can spend hours upon hours working to nail their craft. Verstappen spent 35 hours preparing for the virtual Nurburgring 24-hour race during the 2023 Imola race weekend. He prefers around 50 combined hours.
Team Redline operates similarly to a traditional motorsports team, including “real engineers” working to “optimize everything,” according to Verstappen. It holds pre- and post-race meetings, and the team analyzes the reports to see where they can improve, but Verstappen says this kind of preparation “only happens with the top teams.”
“We really want to be successful,” he added. “You need to operate like that.”
Sim drivers race a full season, similar to how F1 operates. Once they complete a championship on iRacing, for example, they may only have a day or two to rest before preparing for the next race, which could be around three weeks away, Verstappen said. Where it gets more complicated is that you’ve got to pick the right car each time. These drivers are testing different GT cars to identify the fastest for that circuit they’ll compete at and work through a process from there, such as one-lap performance, considering the weather conditions and stint performance, he explained.
Verstappen, No 69, in action during the Porsche TAG Heuer Esports Supercup 2020 Round 2 in 2020. (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
A concept called BoP (balance of performance) in car racing helps ensure a level playing field. Some performance parameters, like weight or power, will be adjusted.
“There are so many, say, e-sports out there. Now, instead of mainly using whatever mouse and keyboard or a controller, there’s a little bit more involved in it. But we tried to mimic the real world,” Verstappen explained. “That’s what all the games try to do. They try to get as much data as possible from the real cars and bring that into the virtual world and try to replicate the same.”
Sim racing has allowed Verstappen to test various cars outside of F1.
A majority of what he drives now is GT-related, as most of the sim racing championships are in that series. While he says he enjoys driving GT cars in real life, that experience also helps him with sim racing — and arguably vice versa, even though one of the biggest differences between sim and real-life racing is the lack of G forces.
In 2021, less than a week after his 51G collision during the British GP, Verstappen hopped onto the sim for the iRacing 24 Hours of Spa, finishing fifth with Jeff Giassi and Gianni Vecchio in a Porsche 911 GT3 R. He told Ziggo Sport in 2021, “Some people think that a sim race can’t be compared with the real thing, but I have set my brake pedal pretty hard at home.”
“It meant I could already practice how my knee would hold up, and my ankle. So when I got into the car here in Hungary, I didn’t have to use much more force than at home. Everything just felt OK. And my neck is doing well as well, so that’s great.”
But sometimes, Verstappen’s sim racing ventures have been questioned when they clash with F1 weekends. A report circulated before the Belgian GP last year that Red Bull had banned the Dutchman from sim racing on grand prix weekends, which Verstappen denied. He stayed up until 3 a.m. on the Sunday of the Hungarian GP the weekend prior while competing in the 24 Hours of Spa on iRacing with Team Redline. The grand prix was a difficult race where Verstappen clashed with Lewis Hamilton and expressed his frustration over strategy calls. He finished fifth.
It wasn’t the first time Verstappen had competed in a sim race during a grand prix weekend. He also did it in Imola, competing in the virtual Nurburgring 24-hour race, and proceeded to win the F1 grand prix. But Verstappen didn’t initially plan to compete during the Hungarian GP weekend. According to Helmut Marko’s post-race column on Speed Week, “His late-night sim appearance on the Hungary weekend only came about because a driver in his team had dropped out.”
Sim racing remains a constant in Verstappen’s life. However, he is considering how to advance his passion in the future. Competing on the sim and GT racing started as a way for him to connect with Team Redline, he told The Athletic in Monaco last year, but now his “main target also has shifted a little bit.”
“Initially on sim racing, I enjoyed it a lot, and it was just a way of connecting with my team, Team Redline,” he continued. “But I also want to find an opportunity for sim drivers to get into the real world.”
Motorsports are expensive, which creates a significant barrier to entry.
The investment varies, but it can range from approximately £1,200 to £3,000 (roughly $1,490 to $3,725) per year just for used equipment, according to the Association of British Karting Clubs. This may include the chassis, engine, race suit, gloves, boots and helmet. Then there are the license fees, track time, maintenance and repairs and equipment, to name a few.
“We all know go-karting and the early steps into racing, they all cost a lot of money,” Verstappen said. “And in sim racing, you can see talent already when they are driving on very easy-going equipment, what you can buy in the local supermarket and save. It all costs a lot less money.
“You can attract talent from all over the world. If you look at people in general in (the F1) paddock, it’s very limited to Europe. Then you’ve got the U.S., Canada, South America, Mexico, (but) it’s not a lot. One driver from China, but it’s not a lot of diversity. In sim racing, there are a lot of different countries already participating, but I just want to try and open it up to many more drivers.
“The price is already a big game changer for that, to find new talent.”
Verstappen feels that, with the right people around him and his experience, he could help a sim driver transition into real-life racing. Speed is something these drivers need to be aware of when they hop into a real-life car for the first time because it is something you don’t feel necessarily on the simulator.
“In the simulator, if you hit a wall, it doesn’t hurt, so you’re not really that afraid when you’re driving,” Verstappen explained. “In real life, when you sit in the car, you have your helmet on, suit, belts are strapped in, you suddenly realize, ‘Wow, I’m in a real car with a real engine. If I crash, it’s going to cost money, and I can hurt myself.’ This whole realization needs to happen.”
There’s also the physical training component. Verstappen said that in the gaming world, people sometimes stay up until the early hours of the morning, to 4 a.m., and their diet may be unhealthy, especially compared to what F1 drivers eat. He added, “They don’t really think about that nutrition side of things, where I do think there we can help as well.”
“You have to go through these kind of stages to make them realize what they have to do to be an athlete, basically,” he continued. “And from there, then you need to give them time. You need to coach them when you’re there in real life, step by step, build up to it. You can’t rush them into something and say, ‘Within a year, you need to be on top of your game.’ They are fighting against people that grew up like me in go-karting and build up a lot of real-life experience.”
Verstappen has already started working on this idea. His manager’s son, Thierry Vermeulen, started racing at 18, entering the space with “zero experience,” Verstappen said. “The only thing he does now is GT3 in real life and then a bit of sim work.”
“So again, we went through that process, and he’s doing incredibly well. He’s fighting against the top drivers. He’s already scoring podiums here and there. Now he’s just waiting to get that moment to win. But he’s really in the mix of good drivers, and every time that I go testing with him, he’s only, like, two-tenths off me, maximum three-tenths, which I think is pretty incredible.”
Verstappen plays with finalists in a SIM race. (Freek van den Bergh/ANP/Sipa USA)
Verstappen is in the prime of his career, with four world championships to his name, and he shows no sign of faltering. But he is thinking of the future.
When the Dutchman wanted to invest more in sim racing, he opted to pour that money and time into Team Redline. He explained how he “saw the potential” and “was really good friends with the ownership at the time,” people who are still involved in the team. But Verstappen did not want to cause a split when he realized he wanted to move into a team owner-type role.
“I’m a loyal person. I really appreciate friendship a lot,” he said. “I could have set up my own team under my own name. I didn’t want to do that because we had such a good group of people at Team Redline that I was like, ‘I don’t want them to then come to me. I want everyone to stay in a structure.’”
Verstappen instead invested and received shares, becoming a majority owner. He added, “I said, you guys started it all, and I find it very important that everyone stays on and, you know, everyone is in their own role, but we keep this winning team – because they were when I joined. They were already incredibly successful.
“I said, ‘But if you really want to be successful for the long term, I need to be more involved, and when I’m going to invest in it, we go all the way’, and that’s basically what happened at one point.”
Verstappen does want to start his own team one day, one that merges real-life racing with sim racing. He has an eye on a few drivers within Team Redline who he feels have the potential; however, he didn’t name anyone specific. “I don’t want to put pressure on them now. Also, from their side, they don’t know yet, but they know my ideas and plans, but they don’t know who is going to be selected yet.”
Pressure is a key concept to remember in all of this. It will take time, patience and investment to merge these two worlds. Some sim racers may have real-life racing experience, initially starting in karting before stopping due to finances, while others may only have virtual experience and need more coaching. He doesn’t want to pressure sim drivers to perform in a year or so in physical racing, or else Verstappen will drop them. He wants to see if there’s a future when these two worlds can collide.
“I know it takes time, but I do want to find the talent that is able to transition to real life,” he said. “Not everyone has that in them. Some are just very good at what they do, and they might not make it in real life, but (I want) at least to give them the opportunity. Ideally, they start with my team, and then they get picked up by manufacturers and then they really build up their career.
“I think that would be a very beautiful story.”
(Top photo courtesy of Red Bull)
