Verstappen furious after Virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans: Never again!

(Motorsport-Total.com) – It’s no secret that Max Verstappen loves to spend his free time with sim racing. The Formula 1 world champion has already participated in the Virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2022, but he crashes at the time.

In this year’s edition, the signs were pointing to revenge. On Team Redline he competed with Jeffrey Rietveld, Luke Browning and Diogo Pinto.

But what started as promising ended in disappointment. Verstappen took the lead in the early stages and never relinquished it. But then, with seven hours to go, the technology suddenly began to strike.

Verstappen’s team was about a minute ahead of the rest of the field at the time. However, server issues put it out of the game for a brief period and by the time it was able to resume racing the car had fallen to 17th. The quartet around Verstappen were now a lap and a half behind.

Verstappen gives up in exasperation

About 90 minutes later, communication problems occurred again, which is why Verstappen gave up in exasperation. Then the Dutchman took out his rage on his Twitch channel, criticizing the organizers. “They can’t even control their game,” said the 25-year-old.

“It’s the third time I’ve been thrown out of the game during this race. It’s also the last time I’ll be involved, because what’s the point?”

“You prepare for five months to win this championship. You drive the championship. You try to win this race. You prepare for two months and then that’s how it goes.”

Not an event, but a “joke”

Said connection issues aside, the race, which was held on Motorsport Games’ rFactor 2 platform, was also twice red-flagged, apparently for safety reasons. Because the cause of the problems should have been DDos attacks.

So the outsiders deliberately tried to overload the servers. When the event resumed, it was then decided to continue racing differently than before in dry conditions and to disable the rain option to counter further disconnections.

In Verstappen, the disappointment was great in the end. “There were two red flags. They stopped the rain because that probably had a really big impact and people are still losing touch. We had it at some point and they just didn’t deal with it.”

“Honestly, this is a joke,” the Dutchman continued. “You can’t call it an event. It’s a clown show. That’s why you had better stop the car.”