No one should ask Max Verstappen to stop late-night gaming
polygon.comI have one thing in common with Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen: we both stay up way too late playing video games.
Of course, at 3 a.m. you’re likely to find me puttering away in Minecraft, while Verstappen is seriously competing in digital endurance races with his esports crew, Team Redline.
After the Hungarian Grand Prix in July saw Verstappen getting remarkably snippy on the team radio, and making an error that sent him airborne after colliding with Lewis Hamilton, pundits across the F1 world started asking the important questions: has Verstappen not matured as a driver since the heated 2021 championship?
No, just kidding. They started asking if he’s cranky from gaming too late.
This stemmed from the 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 o’clock on Sunday morning, the day of the Hungarian Grand Prix. And he was indeed brusque on the radio later that day.
“It’s quite impressive how we let ourselves get undercut and just completely fuck my race,” he told his race engineer — one of many such complaints that ranged in topic 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.”
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