I share one thing in common with Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen: we both stay up way too late playing video games. While I might be found puttering away in Minecraft at 3 a.m., Verstappen is seriously competing in digital endurance races with his esports crew, Team Redline.
After the Hungarian Grand Prix in July, where Verstappen was notably snippy on the team radio and made an error that sent him airborne after colliding with Lewis Hamilton, pundits across the F1 world began asking an important question: was Verstappen cranky from gaming too late? This speculation stemmed from news that Verstappen had pulled an early-morning stint in iRacing’s 24 Hours of Spa event. In endurance racing, each car is piloted by a team of drivers who take shifts at the wheel. Verstappen’s shift reportedly kept him up until 3 a.m. on Sunday, the day of the Hungarian Grand Prix. Indeed, he was brusque on the radio later that day.
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“It’s quite impressive how we let ourselves get undercut and just completely fuck my race,” Verstappen told his race engineer — one of many complaints that ranged from the handling of his car to the behavior of other drivers. Commentators, especially the SkySports F1 team, harped on the perceived issue throughout the broadcast. But sim racing is not a new hobby for Verstappen. Many Formula 1 drivers play video games, but Verstappen does it semi-professionally and he’s very good at it.
Just last January, he led rFactor 2’s virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans race, and lambasted the event organizers when technical issues forced his team to drop out. “It’s amazingly bad luck, or this is just incompetence. This is already the third time this happens to me now, that I get kicked off the game while doing this race,” he complained. “Honestly, it’s a joke. You cannot even call this an event. It’s a clown show.” Since then, Verstappen has switched to the iRacing platform, seemingly with great success. He was up late sim racing before winning the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in March, and before taking home an F1 trophy at Imola in May, he and Team Redline won the Nurburgring 24 Hours.
As usual, the problem was exacerbated when the English-speaking press picked up comments by Red Bull’s advisor and driver development program head, Helmut Marko. In his blog on Speedweek, Marko wrote: “Max Verstappen was rather thin-skinned this weekend, and it didn’t take long before criticism spread — no wonder, since he plays sim racing for half the night.” He went on to write, “we have agreed that he will no longer be driving any simulations this late.” In the same post, Marko acknowledges that the Red Bull car’s upgrades still left them at a frustrating pace disadvantage compared to McLaren… but enough about that.
Headlines spread across the F1 media world that Max Verstappen had been given a “curfew” and been told to “stop gaming.” The very next day, Verstappen denied that he’d been given any kind of curfew or digital race ban. “I don’t need to tell them what to do in their private time over the weekend, and it’s the same for me,” he said at Thursday’s press conference ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix. “For me, this is not something new, I’ve been doing this since 2015, so for me it’s not something that is any different in my preparation.” He added, “I’ve won three world championships – I think I know pretty well what I can and cannot do.”
The problem, dare I say, is not gaming but anyone taking what Helmut Marko says seriously. Marko is constantly popping off in the press and was reportedly told to stop talking publicly during the investigation into sexual harassment allegations against Red Bull team principal Christian Horner earlier this year. Marko has made racist comments about his own driver, stirred up drama about power struggles within the team, and does not hesitate to gossip about his rivals — including supporting Felipe Massa’s petty bid to overturn the race that delivered Lewis Hamilton a championship in 2008. Basically, if there is an opportunity to stir the pot, Helmut Marko will take it.
As for the question of gaming too much, I’ll grant that I don’t perform my job as well when I’ve stayed up late playing games. But Verstappen is a professional athlete with three championships under his belt, and I trust his judgment when it comes to his extracurricular activities.
