Max Verstappen rants after Virtual Le Mans debacle

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This year's Virtual Le Mans 24h race, hosted on rFactor2 and featuring high profile racers, simracers and simracing personnalities, is raising a lot of criticism after the race was riddled with disconnection issues.

The race was red flagged twice due to server crashes, due to security issues according to the organizers, but resumed with rain turned off as an effort to put less strain on the game. Still, multiple teams continued to suffer from disconnects, including team RedLine #1 car, which was in contention for the win prior to that. Max Verstappen, one of the drivers assigned to that car, finally elected to retire from the race with approval from the rest of the team, before commenting on stream he would never participate in events hosted on that platform again.


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The whole situation has been adding fuel to recent controversies surrounding Motorsport Games, the company behind the game and event. Many people have already jumped on it saying this was a bad look for simracing. Romain Grosjean, who posted a tweet dismissing the issues as similar to real life car failures (an unsurprising take considering he's the official technical advisor for MSG), was also met with a considerable wave of disagreement.


In the end, the #888 car from his own esports team, the R8G, won the GT class, while prototype and overall win went to RedLine's #2 car.
About author
GT-Alex
Global motorsports enjoyer, long time simracer, Gran Turismo veteran, I've been driving alongside top drivers since the dawn of online pro leagues on Gran Turismo, and qualified for the only cancelled FIA GTC World Tour. I've left aside competitive driving in 2020 to dedicate myself to IGTL, a simracing organisation hosting high quality events for pro racers and customers, to create with friends the kind of events we wished we could have had. We strive to provide the best events for drivers and the best content for viewers, and want to help the simracing scene grow and shine further in the global esports scene.

Comments

Not a single article about this major Simracing event here.
But now Max been ranting about rF2, here we are jumping the bandwagon to blame rF2.
Classy! :poop:
There been multiple DDS attacks, directly targeted toward the "secret" ip address.
160 drivers with various connections, ranging some even on G4 or Wifi and people from desolate places with low pings.
All need to be constantly connected for 24 hours.
Not many of us could keep their internet connection up for so long.
So many things in between can disrupt the dataflow.
 
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Not a single article about this major Simracing event here.
But now Max been ranting about rF2, here we are jumping the bandwagon to blame rF2.
Classy! :poop:
There been multiple DDS attacks, directly targeted toward the "secret" ip address.
160 drivers with various connections, ranging some even on G4 or Wifi and people from desolate places with low pings.
All need to be constantly connected for 24 hours.
Not many of us could keep their internet connection up for so long.
So many things in between can disrupt the dataflow.

"this major Simracing event" - Sorry for a inconvenient truth.. No one cares (for simracing event as a whole, RD also only talked about the GT finals because had a controversial final), no matter how many times Dmitry Kozko says that 1 trillion of people watched.

We're only talking about it only because of how bad it was and because of Max... and talkin about Verstappen... He lives in a isolated wood house in a mountain, right?

This event was closed for the top notch sim racers and real drivers of the world, sorry, this thing of people with bad internet in isolated place is baseless. This was not a random server, with random people.

Another inconvenient truth, YES was RF2 fault.
 
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Club Staff
Premium
The event was closed for the top notch sim racers and real drivers of the world, sorry, this thing of people with bad internet in isolated place is baseless. This was not a random server, with random people.

Another inconvenient truth, YES was RF2 fault.

They can still have a subpar connection.

Would love for you share more of your intimate knowledge of the rF2 failings in this event though. It will only help other people that run servers (e.g me)
 
I"m surprised - given how much time and effort went into preparing for this - that the organizers thought having drivers dial-in from all over the world over sundry potentially intermittent connections was a good idea given past lessons learned and knowing the limitations of RF2's netcode.

If they treated it more like an actual race, and had everyone co-located on-site for the race over a stable LAN, this could have perhaps gone very differently.
 
They can still have a subpar connection.

Would love for you share more of your intimate knowledge of the rF2 failings in this event though. It will only help other people that run servers (e.g me)

Yeah.... pro sim racers with bad connections...
The F1 World Champion, with bad internet connection..

btw...

I used to run and co-host a rf2 league until mid 2022... We used a dedicated server and I saw every glitch this game have to offer, in such a degree, that I never took part in any league since and consider my self "retired" from league-racing after such a level of disappointment and angry I had.. One of those races btw was a classic 2.4 hours of LeMans that we had to redo twice because of connection problems.


but you can shill for RF2 as you want, no problems, is a fun hot lap simulator.. I get it. Just is not the plataform for a 24 hours race, even less the official Le Mans Virtual.
 
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I"m surprised - given how much time and effort went into preparing for this - that the organizers thought having drivers dial-in from all over the world over sundry potentially intermittent connections was a good idea given past lessons learned and knowing the limitations of RF2's netcode.

If they treated it more like an actual race, and had everyone co-located on-site for the race over a stable LAN, this could have perhaps gone very differently.
LAN party!
 
Club Staff
Premium
Yeah.... pro sim racers with bad connections...
The F1 World Champion, with bad internet connection..

You'd be surprised of the amount of WiFi-racers out there. Even at the pro level.
Bad connection =/= spotty connection and 0.5 mb/s. It can be enough that the provider have a small hiccup. After all, not a single provider guarantees 100% uptime.

btw...

I used to run and co-host a rf2 league until mid 2022... We used a dedicated server and I saw every glitch this game have to offer, in such a degree, that I never took part in any league since and consider my self "retired" from league-racing after such a level of disappointment and angry I had.. One of those races btw was a classic 2.4 hours of LeMans that we had to redo twice because of connection problems.


but you can chill for RF2 as you want, no problems, is a fun hot lap simulator.. I get it. Just is not the plataform for a 24 hours race, even less the official Le Mans Virtual.

Heh. While we've not had a single non-self inflicted server issue here at RD. (The rare situation with server issues, it turns out it my fault...).
Not in the old RDLMS either, with 6-24hrs races.
Not had any server issues in the years we've participated in the Virtual Le Mans Classics either, that goes over a period of 24 hrs.

I don't shill for any game. However, as this is the sim I spend time with every week, both driving and server-wise, I'm always interested in learning more, while also being in a position where I at least have some knowledge to question/correct statements.

In general I think the simracing world would be a much better place if things weren't overblown, restrict hyperbole and in general being supportive, of favorites and "rivals" to try to bring the genre forward.
 
Anyone try turning the server off and then back on?

Getting that upset over a video game, especially from a World Champion I find a bit funny. And the argument of spending months preparing for it, makes it just ridiculous.

I find the whole thing a bit silly, eSports in general that is. But eracing in particular, case in point, a while back Jacques Villeneuve playing with a joystick, while others had full blown motion rigs. :thumbsup:
 
And now we know why Iracing is so expensive.As a multiplayer platform it is not perfect but it outperforms the rest.Crucially the old Iracing 24hr race (& upcoming Daytona 24Hr) is open to anyone to enter & you race at the same time as the pros in the top split in the many lower splits.
 
I"m surprised - given how much time and effort went into preparing for this - that the organizers thought having drivers dial-in from all over the world over sundry potentially intermittent connections was a good idea given past lessons learned and knowing the limitations of RF2's netcode.

If they treated it more like an actual race, and had everyone co-located on-site for the race over a stable LAN, this could have perhaps gone very differently.
I doubt the real life racers would attend weekend event in Abu Dhabi or similar.It needs to develop its own driver & teams to have a single venue event & their simply is enough viewers of sim racing Esports.The LM24 had about 4k viewers,Jimmie Broadbent had 7k and Dubai 24 had more.
 
I have heard rumour that very few efforts were made as they were in other games recently to secure the servers against this sort of attack.

This is an oversight as people running far lesser series were aware of this sort of thing.

I do not at all like this pathetic ownership garbage, we own the game so this race will be run on our game, and no-one else can run it, well if it is this poor don't blame all the top teams for badgering ACC or I racing or anyone else to outbid you and run their own version, find a way to run it away from this rubbish, it looks crummy anyway, always has. It is this sort of crap that turns me off sport and sim racing in general, We own it so we do what we want, but you must use our game, what if you game has ALWAYS had issues and you make yourself look pathetic in the biggest event of the year, and did nothing to prevent it, I would say that makes you look dumb and would not encourage people to play the rot.

I have some sympathy with Max, and all the comment is about him because of who he is, but he is a bit part player here a hobbyist, some of these guys would have saved up for this and are semi/full time pro simmers, it is them I feel sorry for, not this petulant little child.
 
Frankly, I'm surprised that a double F1 champion is taking simracing so seriously. If there's one person who should know the difference between real racing and sim racing, it's him.

This is much ado about nothing. I really don't see what's the point of watching a bunch of people sitting at home, wearing polo shirts, racing imaginary cars on imaginary tracks.
 

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Alexandre Tonini
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  • Watch party

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  • At a friends house

    Votes: 24 2.8%
  • At Le Mans

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