Category: E-Sports

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Virtual Le Mans – A spectacle in sim racing

As has been the case with a lot of the major motorsport championships during this pandemic, we have seen the rise of sim racing to fill that void. Had these motorsport events not been postponed, the weekend of June 14th would have been the season finale for the 2019-20 FIA World Endurance Championship season with the 88th running of the 24 hours of Le Mans. That has been postponed until September, but in its original June slot will be a virtual rendition sanctioned officially by the FIA and ACO.

Normal Le Mans 24 will not happen til September 19th. Image courtesy of Joao Filipe, Adrenal Media / FIA Wec

Dubbed the Le Mans 24 Virtual, the race will be held using rFactor 2 and will feature 50 entries consisting of four drivers each across two classes; LMP2 will be the leading class with all entrants using the Oreca 07 and they will be accompanied by LMGTE cars from the likes of Ferrari, Porsche, Aston Martin and Corvette. It looks set to be the peak of sim racing already, as the list of drivers who have signed up to compete is absolutely incredible!

Where to begin? Perhaps with some prominent F1 drivers. Max Verstappen and Lando Norris are back again in a 24 hour virtual race, hoping to repeat their win in the iRacing Spa 24 hours only this time without Max’s brake pedal falling off 15 minutes from the end. They’re racing with Team RedLine once again, one of if not the most successful sim racing team of all time and they’ll be partnered up with sim racers Atze Kerkhof and Greger Huttu.

Team RedLine will also be running the two entries of the WEC team Jota Sport, featuring the likes of Formula E championship leader António Félix da Costa and 2019 IndyCar rookie of the year Felix Rosenqvist alongside two very successful sim racers. The sim racers being inaugural World’s Fastest Gamer winner and former McLaren simulator driver Rudy van Buren, who is Mahindra’s Formula E simulator development driver and will be racing this year in Porsche Carrera Cup Deutschland, and the other being McLaren Shadow Project Final winner Kevin Siggy who is currently leading the Formula E Race at Home Challenge for sim racers.

Another prominent team in the world of sim racing is Veloce Esports, and they’re fielding three entrants in the top class with current and former F1 drivers: Pierre Gasly, Stoffel Vandoorne and Jean-Éric Vergne. F1 Esports race winner Jarno Opmeer, 14-year old Veloce Academy protégé Tomek ‘Hyperz’ Poradzisz, and the second World’s Fastest Gamer winner James Baldwin who is set to race this year in the GT World Challenge for Jenson Button’s Team Rocket squad.

Speaking of Jenson Button, he’s also racing in this, as are his former F1 teammates Fernando Alonso and Rubens Barrichello. Even the likes of Indy 500 winners Juan Pablo Montoya, Tony Kanaan and Simon Pagenaud are competing. Let’s just hope the latter doesn’t try to take Lando out again!

Two other current F1 drivers are competing, that being Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Alfa Romeo’s Antonio Giovinazzi, and they’re paired up with Ferrari’s current F1 and SRO GT Esports drivers, reigning F1 Esports champion David Tonizza and 2018 eRace of Champions winner Enzo Bonito. Alongside them in the GT class will be Felipe Massa and Giancarlo Fisichella, who are racing an entry backed by Strong Together, a foundation set up by Charlene, Princess of Monaco.

The FIA’s Women In Motorsport is represented by Katherine Legge, Sophia Flörsch, Tatiana Calderón and Emily Jones with the Richard Mille Racing Team. However the most notable woman in racing right now, W Series champion Jamie Chadwick is also racing and she’s going to be sharing driving duties with YouTube sim racing royalty Jimmy Broadbent!

The 2020 Virtual Le Mans entry list. Image courtesy of Fia Wec
Second part of the 2020 Virtual Le Mans entry list. Image courtesy of Fia Wec

Other notable drivers taking part include Pietro Fittipaldi and also F2 drivers Louis Delétraz and Jack Aitken who are both racing for Williams and Rebellion’s collaboration effort. Former F1 driver Olivier Panis is also competing, and that’s before we even get onto some of the regulars of the WEC and the 24 hours of Le Mans.

Toyota drivers Sébastien Buemi, Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway, José María López and Brendon Hartley will be in the top class. Along with the likes of André Lotterer, Nicki Thiim, Will Stevens, Bruno Senna, Neel Jani, Norman Nato, Nicolas Lapierre, Darren Turner, Nick Tandy, Dries Vanthoor, Filipe Albuquerque, Nicky Catsburg, Jan Magnussen, Miguel Molina, Tommy Milner and Thomas Laurent, all of these are just some of the 200 names you will see when you tune in to the Virtual 24 hours of Le Mans on June 13th!

So how do you watch? It will be streamed on the official Motorsport TV website and possibly Twitch as well? TV scheduling may or may not happen and will vary between country, you will need to check back on social media, Fia Wec’s website

But what does this really mean? This is probably the biggest sim race of all time in terms of driver caliber, and it’s just absolutely incredible to behold. It could open up doors to potentially get more of these sim races to happen in the future during the off-season and maybe for a great cause too!

Yes we’re probably all fed up of sim racing and a lot of the controversies to come along with it, but you can’t deny it’s better than just twiddling our thumbs waiting for real racing to begin again. Sim racing has been immense during this wait, and it doesn’t look set to be slowing down even when real racing gets back going again.

So until that happens, I hope you will join me as a viewer of this landmark sim race. A real spectacle in sim racing!

Featured image courtesy of FIA Wec

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Sim racing’s life beyond real racing’s return

As a lot of you will have been saying, I’ve been the one championing sim racing’s rise to the fore in the absence of real-world action and it’s still going strong of course. However, we must now turn our attention to how sim racing fits in with a post-sim racing world, if you will. A lot of people tend to be quite absent-minded about how sim racing is being treated, and make very ignorant statements assuming it’s trying to replace the real deal.

This all started the weekend that the Australian GP was cancelled. We had The Race with their All-Star event and Veloce Esports hosting their first rendition of the Not The GP. Since then, so much more has happened! Off the top of my head, we’ve had Formula E’s Race At Home Challenge on rFactor 2 and IndyCar and Aussie SuperCars hosting their own championships on iRacing. Then there’s also FIA World Rallycross Championship have doing races on DIRT Rally 2.0, DTM and WTCR have their Esports series on RaceRoom, GT World Challenge doing the SRO E-sports GT Series on Assetto Corsa Competizione, MotoGP’s Virtual Races on the MotoGP 20 game and last but not least, Formula One’s own Virtual Grand Prix events on F1 2019, with the addition of the F1 Esports drivers doing their Pro Exhibition event and now drivers from a plethora of junior formulae competing in the F2 Virtual races.

There’s definitely more I’ve missed, but at least you understand the vast scale of the impact of Esports. Not only that, we’ve started to see a lot of drivers turn to streaming on Twitch, with Lando Norris leading the charge and being joined by a lot of his peers including Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Alex Albon and many more. Just last Friday, I saw those four all playing Rocket League together; it was so indescribable, the joy I felt seeing four of my favourite F1 drivers playing car football.

This difficult time for all of us will hopefully soon be over. There are plans for the F1 season to finally begin in Austria on the weekend of July 5th, with efforts in place to hopefully prevent anyone from contracting the virus and with no crowds. By that point, you could say that we don’t need sim racing and in a sense you’re right. It wouldn’t be filling any voids, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to stop.

When racing isn’t going on during the traditional European winter, you would have Formula E as well as some other winter series like F3 Asia or Toyota Racing Series. But I think sim racing can still work very well in that time-frame, maybe not with a lot of the same active pro drivers but I still definitely think a few will still want to take part.

Getty Images / Red Bull Content Pool

The trouble would come by making it an obligation. We’ve seen drivers being made to take part and losing sponsorship from treating a properly sanctioned event too casually. Whilst we would expect a broadcast and sponsored race to have some form of etiquette and professionalism, the trouble would come when these drivers are told to compete when they just want some down-time.

We’ve seen some casual races from a few of these guys looking to mess around. The famous clips of Alex Albon being punted off in some way by George Russell in lawnmower race or on the F1 game coupled with the sound “GEEOORRGGEEE!!!” come to mind, and as long as they mind don’t use abhorrent words (think of Kyle Larson) then that’s all good. But, for some fun yet still sporting events that drivers can compete in, they should be able to decide during their own time whether they want to do them or not.

We could even see in the future, a lot of championships adopting a type of sim racing to fit in with their race meetings. Formula E have been doing that for years, where a pick of their drivers go to a sim racing tent in the paddock between qualifying and the race and go up against a group of fans who have entered into it through some kind of qualification.

Mercedes AMG Esports

Those may not be the most professional of races but it’s something. A lot of the sim races that have been going on are treated as their own thing and are being held with the philosophy of entertaining fans first and foremost, and even though it’s never going to match up with the real thing, it’s a better than nothing at all.

Also, keep it online for free. The brilliance of sim racing is that it’s so easily accessible both as a viewer and a competitor, and I don’t want to see a paywall for sim racing. I get it for real racing, but I’ll be very disappointed if a championship is not streamed to YouTube/Twitch etc. and is only on a channel like Sky Sports, BT Sport or Eurosport.

Heading forward, organisers can still use sim racing to compliment the real racing. Both as entertainment during a point where the real racing isn’t happening that can be open to entry, or in the lead up to a real world event. Plus why not throughout the week? Who is to say that there should only be racing at the weekend?

There’s nothing wrong with something more. If it isn’t your thing, you don’t have to watch it.

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IndyCar’s disgrace of an iRace

There was a lot to be enjoyed in the Esports races on Saturday. Firstly there was the second round of the Formula E Stay At Home Challenge, taking place on rFactor 2 with Studio 397’s own circuit Electric Docks which made for some incredible high speed racing. Then we had the first of a set of rounds that made up a new season of the All-Star Esports Series by The Race where Pros, Sim drivers and Legends all raced at Sepang to contend for their own championships and it even included brands such as Mercedes, BMW, Bentley, Aston Martin, Williams and Venturi officially taking part in it too. Finally, we also saw two races in Veloce’s Not The GP series where Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc had some incredible battles on the Hockenheim circuit with some of the top names from the world of Formula 1 Esports and Online Content Creation.

But we are talking about the final round of the IndyCar iRacing Challenge, racing 70 laps of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. McLaren’s own Lando Norris was participating after making a guest appearance in last week’s race at the Circuit of the Americas, and despite spinning in the middle of the race, he still blitzed the field. This seemingly ruffled a few feathers.

Norris qualified second for the defacto ‘Indy 175’ to Aussie SuperCars champion Scott McLaughlin and despite never having done oval racing before, he was doing very good. He had put an immense amount of practice in with the help of his former F1 engineer Andrew Jarvis, who left McLaren’s F1 division to a new role in their upcoming IndyCar programme.

At one point in the race, a caution period had come out and Lando had just pitted so he had the grippiest rubber out of all the leading group so he looked to be in the best position to win. Ahead of him is reigning Indy 500 winner Simon Pagenaud, who in all the previous IndyCar iRacing Challenge events, had won all the oval races and was looking to get a clean sweep.

Pagenaud and Graham Rahal were fighting for the lead and Norris went low on both of them, there was a noticeable gap between Norris and Rahal, but there is an unfortunate thing that happens in online racing called netcode, where there’s a slight lag in connection and subsequently, it feels like there is a collision when there isn’t. So Rahal unfortunately was netcode hit by Norris even though Norris didn’t do such a thing, and Rahal collided with Pagenaud and it ruined their races. A shame all round because I was looking forward to watching the battle between all these top-level professionals, but that term seems to not apply now, at least to Pagenaud.

Through I believe Pagenaud’s engineer’s Twitch stream, they seemed to joke about wanting to take out Norris and were badmouthing him as if he actually had done something wrong. But as clear as day in the video I’m going to provide of Lando watching a replay of that Twitch stream after the race, Pagenaud turned in on him heading into the last lap and what seemed to be an all-but-certain victory for Lando was taken from him. Pagenaud even tried to play it off as trying to go to the pits..

You’ll also hear in that clip, Lando was in an online chat with fellow Team RedLine sim racing drivers Graham Carroll, Bono Huis and Max Verstappen, and it was Max who suggested they settle these incidents with a boxing match. Rather amusing.

Not only what Pagenaud did, but on the last lap, McLaren’s two other drivers got involved in incidents. Patricio O’Ward tried to overtake Ganassi’s Marcus Ericsson heading into the last corner but was way too overly ambitious and desperate, it was never on and it cost Ericsson the victory. So it was left to McLaren’s third driver Oliver Askew to win the race for the team, but it wasn’t to be as the polarising Santino Ferrucci swerved across him on the run to the line, and there to pick up the pieces despite not being anywhere near the front for most of the last few laps, was pole-sitter Scott McLaughlin.

An absolute mess. Inevitably you’ll hear the “Just a game” argument, both from people like Ferrucci (who has form for doing this in real world racing as well!) who pull a David Perel and say it’s okay to be dirty in the virtual world since nobody gets hurt, and then you have the people who see this as insignificant because it’s some immature boy’s hobby to play video games so what’s the fuss about?

I love my virtual racing but this has just left a sour taste in my mouth. I’ve lost a lot of respect for Simon Pagenaud, and I didn’t have any for Ferrucci anyway since he was said to have been racist to his then-F2 teammate Arjun Maini back in 2018 and also purposely driving into him on the cooldown lap.

It’s also been disappointing seeing IndyCar commentator Paul Tracy put on his tin foil hat and claim that Ferrucci’s steering conveniently had been hacked or glitched on the run to the line. It’s not surprising honestly, they love him on the IndyCar coverage.

This doesn’t ruin Esports and sim racing for me, I’ll always love it but it’s not surprising at all to know that people from outside the virtual racing bubble don’t take this seriously. With all the progress being made by Esports whilst we don’t have real racing, this has been a huge step backwards for both Esports and also IndyCar.

Image courtesy of IndyCar

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Driver Spotlight: Arthur Leclerc – Out of his brother’s shadow

I think I speak for a lot of us when I say that I am a huge Charles Leclerc fan, seeing his ascendency from joining the Ferrari Driver Academy, and winning the GP3 and Formula 2 championships then graduating to Formula 1 with Sauber and now a Grand Prix winner with Ferrari, it has truly been incredible.

He’s also been proving to be quite handy on the Esports side, racking up both wins in the last two F1 Virtual Grand Prix events, winning the Veloce Versus 1v1 event and also streaming on Twitch with the many other F1 drivers taking to Esports scene, raising money for charity in a set of races called ‘Race for the World’ which he also won.

However in all but the most recent Virtual GP, there has been a Ferrari being driven by another Leclerc, this being Charles’ younger brother Arthur. For this year, he was picked up by Ferrari to be on their driver academy like his sibling four years prior and it would be easy to assume that there is a bit of nepotism involved, considering other members of the academy include the sons of Michael Schumacher, Jean Alesi and the grandson of Emerson Fittipaldi.

I thought I’d run you all through why I think Arthur Leclerc could be one to look out for in the future and his recruitment to Ferrari’s young driver programme isn’t merely just because of being Charles’ younger brother.

Whilst Charles arrived into single seaters in 2014 off the back of major success in the karting scene, Arthur was only just starting out in karts despite only being three years younger than his highly rated brother. Arthur actually managed to win the Kart Racing Academy championship in France, but due to budgetary issues, he was out of racing for the next four years and in that time, Charles made that climb up the ladder and into F1.

The older Leclerc always had that issue early in his career, they never had a lot of money and if it weren’t for Nicolas Todt, his career would have been over. So it was the same case for younger Leclerc, who only got back into racing because of backing from his uncle, who set up an e-bike company. This helped him seal a place in the relatively low-budget French F4 championship in 2018.

Despite not racing for four years, it was like Arthur had never been away! He won a reverse-grid race in his first event, held his own in a battle with eventual dominant champion Caio Collet at the Pau circuit, took pole at a very wet Spa-Francorchamps and had it not been for some rotten luck in the final round, would have finished runner-up. That year, he also became a part of the Venturi Formula E team’s junior programme, alongside a selection of drivers from single seaters, karting and Esports.

For 2019, he stepped up to the German-based ADAC F4 championship and took his first victory at Hockenheim which supported the German Grand Prix, and Charles was there to greet him when he pulled up into parc fermé. Arthur raced for the Sauber Junior Team by Charouz, and even with the single victory he finished third in the championship, behind the highly rated pair of Red Bull junior Dennis Hauger and the champion Théo Pourchaire, one of Leclerc’s teammates.

That result is mightily impressive considering the level of talent in that field, and the fact he had nowhere near the amount of racing experience of his peers. Despite being three years older than Pourchaire, he had eight years less racing experience, so bearing all that in mind, that makes Leclerc’s results even more impressive.

Whilst Pourchaire and Hauger are stepping up to the Grand Prix-supporting FIA Formula 3 for this season, Leclerc has gone in another direction and joined up with Prema – the team that his brother won the 2017 FIA Formula 2 championship with – in the Formula Regional European Championship. A lower tier F3 series that races for the most part in Italy.

Arthur is now 19, the same age Charles was when he won the GP3 championship. The Prema team was very much a dominant force in Formula Regional last season and even with highly rated teammates like Roman Staněk, Oliver Rasmussen and fellow Ferrari junior Gianluca Petecof, I am very confident that Arthur is the favourite for the championship.

Last time we had an F1 driver called Charles, he also had a racing driver brother called Arthur, I’m referring to the Pic brothers. Charles Pic raced for tailender teams Marussia and Caterham between 2012 and 2013, whilst his brother Arthur Pic got as high as GP2. This time round, Charles Leclerc is in F1 and is one of the top drivers, and with his recruitment to Ferrari’s programme, would it be so absurd to liken the Leclerc brothers to the Márquez brothers in MotoGP?

Marc and Álex Márquez won a championship apiece in the lower and intermediate classes of Grand Prix motorcycle racing and now they are teammates at the Repsol Honda team that Marc has won all but one MotoGP world championship with since joining them in 2013. Could Arthur join Charles at Ferrari in the next few years? It’s not out of the question! But I won’t get ahead of myself. For the time being, let’s see how Arthur does and see if skill and excellence is in his blood.

Image courtesy of Scuderia Ferrari Formula 1 Team.

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An introduction to F1 Esports drivers.

Over the weekend of what should have been the Vietnam Grand Prix, we were treated to some Esports action as we have come to expect. The highlight of the weekend arguably was the second rendition of the F1 Virtual Grand Prix. Following on from the first event which took place over the weekend of the Bahrain Grand Prix, where two of the real-world regular drivers Lando Norris and Nicholas Latifi were joined by other pro drivers and even a golfer, and Olympic cyclist and a member of One Direction.

However for this event, Norris and Latifi were joined by the likes of Charles Leclerc, Alex Albon, George Russell, Antonio Giovinazzi, and even 2009 world champion Jenson Button. It was held on the Australian GP circuit (since Vietnam was a new addition to the calendar and thus not on the F1 2019 game they were using) and was won rather convincingly by Leclerc, ahead of Renault F2 driver Christian Lundgaard and Russell was P3 in the Williams. Yes, that did happen, though there is equal performance with all the cars.

However I’d like to bring some spotlight to the race following that, the Pro Exhibition. All of the F1 teams let their Esports racers off of their leash to showcase some of the best in virtual racing, just like they’ve been doing in the F1 Esports Series that has been running since 2017.

In the inaugural season, 40 drivers went through qualifications and made it to the semi-finals and 20 of them went to compete in the finals held alongside that year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. After the three 25% distance races held across two days, it was then-kitchen manager Brendon Leigh who performed an incredible move on Fabrizio Donoso to seal the first championship ahead of Donoso and Sven Zurner.

For the 2018 season, all but one of the teams got involved and would pick players who entered through online qualifications and an evaluation process, and they would go on to compete in a full 10-race season held exclusively in London’s Gfinity Esports Arena across three live shows. Drivers would go for individual glory, whilst a prize pot of $200,000 would be distributed among the team’s for their position in the final standings.

Again, it was Brendon Leigh who would come out on top in a dominant display driving for Mercedes, winning six out of 10 races with the other races being won by Merc teammate Dani Bereznay, Toro Rosso’s Frederik Rasmussen and Sauber’s Salih Saltunç. With it, Merc also won the constructor’s champions.

For 2019, the team that didn’t want to take part finally caught the Esports bug, Ferrari. This may have been a stroke of genius because as a result, they got first pickings in the Pro Draft, and selected David Tonizza. A driver who failed to get picked by anyone in 2018, but came back and immediately hit the ground running.

Even with the onslaught of talent around him including the likes of Rasmussen and Bereznay – who had moved to Red Bull and Alfa Romeo respectively – as well as former Renault Junior driver turned Renault Esports driver Jarno Opmeer and the now two-time champion Brendon Leigh, Tonizza was unfazed and racked up three victories from the twelve races to just pip a late-charging Rasmussen to the title in the last race. However, due to Red Bull’s drivers scoring more points than Ferrari’s due to Tonizza’s teammates not scoring any points, Red Bull won the team’s championship and with it, the majority of the now $500,000 prize pot.

As you can imagine, a lot of gamers want to make their way into the Esports series but it’s only two drivers per team in one race. So three drivers are signed and you’ll see some drivers prioritising more time on some tracks over others to get the best possible result, albeit that does come with its downside. Both 2018 and 2019, Frederik Rasmussen lost out on being runner-up and a shot at the championship respectively because he elected to step down and have his teammates race.

Then on the flip side of that, former Sauber driver Allert van der Wal was drafted by McLaren Shadow in 2019 but he didn’t compete in any race, at least I don’t remember seeing him. Plus, Red Bull drafted a guy called Nicolas Longuet but he only did the one race at Monza where he managed to finish in the top three!

The system is flawed but can be worked on, especially now since we have this unprecedented opportunity to polish the rough spots. We now have these proper online races taking place and in the Pro Exhibition, Frederik Rasmussen won from David Tonizza and Haas Esports driver Floris Wijers. We now have another upcoming Pro Exhibition race this weekend on the Shanghai circuit, which will take place before the Virtual Grand Prix race.

We have so many top-line drivers who can win and be successful in F1 Esports, and I’d love to see a full on championship held every week similar to that of a lot of online League championships, such as Apex Online Racing. As much as I like the idea of the three races in one event, F1 Esports seems a bit safe and lacking behind the FIA Gran Turismo Championships in many departments.

Nevertheless, I hope you lot feel compelled to watch the F1 team’s Esports drivers tackling the Chinese GP circuit on Sunday potentially before the Virtual Grand Prix Series race.

Be on the lookout for Formula 1’s own social media channels for how you can watch these races…

Images taken from actual game play…

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Driver Spotlight: James Baldwin – Sim Racing’s All Star | Part One

I am sure a lot of you have been enjoying the Esports races that have been happening and have been keeping us sane whilst we await the return of real life racing. With the events organised by The Race with their All-Star Esports Battle races and Veloce’s Not The GP series now being joined by their own Pro Series, and not forgetting F1, IndyCar and MotoGP among others organising their own events, we are not short of choice, are we?

Seeing what has been happening in this trying time has been great, and seeing many notable real-world racers take to the virtual world to keep themselves sharp and us entertained is just great to see. Max Verstappen and Lando Norris have been the leading lights with their large followings, helping show what sim racing can really provide.

However, as much as this is familiar surroundings for one driver in particular, I know that he will want to get on the real track very soon. He has been participating in these events alongside Verstappen and Norris and in the first race of the Veloce Pro Series, he finished second to Lando. This driver being James Baldwin.

Like Max and Lando, Baldwin started out racing karts aged eight and won four British karting championships by the age of 15. He attempted a move up into cars in 2015, but only had the money to do a grand total of two races in Formula Ford, so with all that pressure of his family’s money being put into these races, James quite understandably felt that pressure a bit too much. He did those two races and there was no more money, and his racing dream was seemingly over.

After a while out of the driving seat, James shifted his focus to sim racing and quickly proceeded to pick up where he left off in the success department. Through an event organised by Renault on the game Project CARS 2 in which he won, Baldwin got an invitation to participate in the eRace of Champions, where the winner would be allowed to compete in the main Race of Champions at the venue for the Mexican Grand Prix.

The Race of Champions is a tournament in which drivers from many different disciplines compete with equal machinery on makeshift circuits in stadiums to find out who is the champion of all champions. In 2018, the organisers opened up an Esports competition in which Italian driver Enzo Bonito won and therefore allowed him to compete in the main event alongside World’s Fastest Gamer winner Rudy van Buren.

For the 2019 event, Bonito would be joined in the Sim Racing All Stars team by whoever would succeed him as the eROC winner and everyone was expecting him to be joined by two-time F1 Esports champion Brendon Leigh. But in a huge upset, Baldwin defeated Leigh to become eROC champion and he impressed the judges along the way, those judges being nine-times Le Mans winner Tom Kristensen, 2001 F1 runner-up David Coulthard and renowned stunt driver Terry Grant.

He lined up alongside Bonito for the Nation’s Cup competition in the Sim Racing All Star team and also competed for individual glory in the Race of Champions. Whilst his Nation’s Cup teammate grabbed the headlines for defeating Formula E champion Lucas di Grassi and IndyCar champion Ryan Hunter-Reay, Baldwin was by no means any slouch as he won against local NASCAR hero Rubén García Jr. in one of the heats.

This would only be the start of a year of ascendency for James Baldwin, otherwise known as Veloce Jaaames. Yes, three A’s, he didn’t fall asleep on his keyboard when he was coming up with that.

As you can tell by the other part of that username, James is a part of Veloce Esports. The team founded by Formula E champion Jean-Éric Vergne and teammate from his Carlin F3 days Rupert Svendson-Cook, which has really led the charge and pioneered the turn of introducing Esports to a mainstream audience. Their initial focus was on virtual racing before expanding into FPS games and even the car football game Rocket League.

Back to James now, because 2019 had not even gotten started for him and it was not about to stop. He entered into the Project CARS world championships which were taking place at the Mercedes headquarters in Stuttgart and James ended up winning that. Veloce then entered last minute as a wildcard into the Le Mans Esports Series Super Final which would take place before the 24 hours of Le Mans.

In an incredible and never-seen-before format, the teams made up of three drivers would – just like in real life – race for 24 straight hours but in nine races on both historical and modern variants of the Le Mans circuit as well as races at Silverstone, Spa and Sebring in a vast variety of car classes ranging from 1960s Le Mans cars, Group C, GTE, LMP cars of varying eras and many more.

From 11am to 9:30am the following day, all twelve teams would compete in two or three hour enduros to rack up points, and it was one second head start in the final for every point more than the team behind them. Baldwin and his two Veloce stablemates Noah Schmitz and David Kelly overcame a 15-second deficit to somehow win the final 90-minute race and therefore won the whole event and a hefty cash prize! They stood on the Le Mans podium, sprayed champagne whilst all the teams prepared for the start of the real-life 24 hour race and presumably they all went to bed and collapsed from exhaustion.

Images courtesy of WFG

AND Veloce Esports

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Sim racing to the rescue?

Is 2020 about to become the year that digital motorsport raced to the forefront and is taken seriously?

When I agreed to be a contributor to ThePitCrewOnline, I wasn’t going to restrict myself to what I was going to write about and I would write about anything that took my interest. My first article was about Igor Fraga, a Brazilian racing driver whose involvement in sim racing through competitions such as F1 Esports, FIA Gran Turismo championships and the McLaren Shadow Project Final has resulted in him sealing a place in the FIA Formula 3 championship.

I originally wrote that with the notion that the first round of F3 – which was set to take place alongside the Bahrain Grand Prix – was still happening, then we had this pandemic happen and it has thrown a minor spanner in the works with regards to all these motorsport events getting postponed and cancelled. I don’t think it needs to be said but in case it’s lost on anybody; the health of others is more important than some cars going around a track.

In my previous article, I mention a lot of success stories from the world of sim racing but the other beauty of it is that during such horrid circumstances, something very beautiful can come from it. Having mentioned it briefly since it was all happening very last minute when I was writing it, events were organised by The Race and Veloce Esports that took the place of the real-life racing that was cancelled over the weekend of what was supposed to be the Australian Grand Prix.

The first event by The Race was called the All-Star Esports Battle and had participants ranging from professional drivers such as Max Verstappen, Simon Pagenaud and Juan-Pablo Montoya, sim racers such as Rudy van Buren, James Baldwin and McLaren Shadow Project winner Kevin Siggy Rebernak, and also online personalities like the incredibly beloved Jimmy Broadbent.

Racing in 2012-style F1 cars on rFactor 2 at the Nürburgring GP circuit, and organised everyone into heat races; one for pro drivers, one for sim racers and the final one for drivers who entered online qualifications. Pro driver heat was won by Verstappen, the sim racer heat by van Buren and the qualifying heat by a driver named Jernej Simoncic. It was an incredible event seeing all these contrasting characters unified in the face of adversity, and the final was won in the end by Simoncic.

Moving onto the Veloce event – dubbed the #NotTheAusGP – Lando Norris was participating and he was joined by YouTuber WillNE, Real Madrid C.F. goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, and was even joined by James Baldwin and Jimmy Broadbent, who participated in the All-Star Esports Battle. On the F1 2019 game at the Melbourne circuit with a 50% race distance and the event was incredibly entertaining! Particularly as we saw Lando Norris having to fight through the field after getting disqualified during qualifying, and for most of the race he fought with Tiametmarduk, who I boldly claim makes the best F1 centred content on YouTube.

The event was won in the end by Alfa Romeo F1 Esports driver and friendly giant, Daniel Bereznay. Both these races are available to rewatch on YouTube from the weekend of March 15th on both The Race and Veloce Esports’ YouTube channels, but from the last weekend of March 22nd, we have had follow-up events from both of those and also an officially sanctioned event by F1 itself being referred to as the Virtual Grand Prix series.

Round two of the All-Star Esports battle took place on rFactor 2 again but this time at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s Grand Prix circuit in Indy Pro 2000 cars. The event consisted of two heat races for pro drivers, one for sim drivers and then a last chance race for the pro drivers who didn’t finish in the top five in the first two heats. The first pro driver heat was won by IndyCar driver Felix Rosenqvist and the second by Rudy van Buren, with Kevin Siggy Rebernak winning the sim racers heat and the last chance race being won by GP2 race winner Tom Dillmann.

In the end, the overall event was won by Rudy van Buren ahead of Kevin Siggy Rebernak and the top real world professional driver Daniel Juncadella just beating out Felix Rosenqvist for that honour. Other notable competitors in this event were former F1 drivers Nico Hülkenberg, Stoffel Vandoorne and Esteban Gutiérrez, all three of whom would compete in the next two big events.

On Sunday, both Veloce Esports put together the #NotTheBahGP and F1 themselves put together the Virtual Grand Prix. Along with those three former F1 drivers that I mentioned, we had Lando Norris also competing in these races, Jimmy Broadbent having done the All-Star Esports Battle doubled up his Sunday with both events and joining them would be professional golfer Ian Poulter.

In the Veloce event, instead of a 50% distance race like the proceeding Veloce event, it was two 25% distance races with the second of those races utilising a full-on reverse grid where the first race’s winner would start last with the slower running drivers up at the front. As again, the alien that is Daniel Bereznay swept the first race and despite starting last for the second race, he was near the front before spinning and having to settle for third, with Red Bull Esports driver and real-world GT4 racer Cem Bölükbaşı taking that race. That second race in particular was incredibly entertaining, and pretty much like the whole concept of these races taking place, it’s difficult to describe without anyone seeing it with their own eyes.

Moving onto the officially sanctioned by F1 event, dubbed the Virtual Grand Prix which included the likes of Johnny Herbert, Anthony Davidson, Luca Salvadori, Sir Chris Hoy, Nic Hamilton and Liam Payne. The race was won by Renault F1 junior driver Guanyu Zhou ahead of Stoffel Vandoorne and DTM driver Philipp Eng, the event did have a few technical hiccups and of course it didn’t feature the most professional drivers but it was fun!

That is something I want to touch upon. In these events, you may not see a lot of professional racing but it’s just some fun and entertainment whilst we all go through this difficult time. If you want to have the event that is in terms of driver ability the best, then you will want to watch the All-Star Esports Battle. The Veloce Esports organised events are a good middle ground of driver ability and people looking for some fun who are there to entertain, then the F1 Virtual Grand Prix is pretty much an all out celebrity race for the most part.

It may, unfortunately, be a while before we are back to normal, I hope it is very soon but until then, don’t be a miserable mush and dismiss any digital forms of racing. What’s happening right now sucks, but as a result of it all has come something beautiful, a bunch of people from varying walks of life have come together to try and entertain all of you lot.

One of the best things about this is seeing these guys stream their races to Twitch and YouTube. There’s an entertaining video that Benjamin Daly a.k.a. Tiametmarduk uploaded which featured him battling with Lando Norris, and seeing the reactions of the pair of them was just brilliant.

It may not be top quality racing like we come to expect of professional drivers but it’s something.

I hope I haven’t put myself in a bubble here by writing about Esports-related articles, especially as my next intended article was putting the spotlight on James Baldwin, a driver who has ascended to new heights thanks to Esports just like Igor Fraga. It’s not the circumstances I’d have preferred but I think for the time being, Esports is what may keep us lot sane!

I will provide links to the YouTube videos and also the subsequent channels of a fair amount of these sim races. The All-Star Esports Battle, the Veloce ‘Not The GP’ and the first F1 Virtual Grand Prix, along with an event that Team RedLine (the Esports team that Max Verstappen and Lando Norris are a part of) held recently as well. They’re all the raw footage from all the live streams, so since a majority of you are stuck inside, you’ve got some time to kill, haven’t you?

Keep on the lookout for any more major Esports racing events taking place over the next few weeks. I know they aren’t planning on slowing down any time soon!

Anyway, hope you’re all doing well and hopefully we’ll be out of the woods soon.

We will race on.

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