When Max Verstappen is not happy, everyone knows it. While taking part in the virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans with the RFactor 2 game, the Dutch Red Bull Formula 1 driver was forced to give up due to connection problems. A withdrawal that made him rant live on his Twitch channel. The two time champion declared he’ll quit racing RFactor.
While he was in the lead, a disconnection forced him to retire. The race rules state that if “four or more drivers disconnect at the exact same time, but without clear evidence of server problems, the race management may decide, at its discretion, to award the teams concerned laps up to a maximum of three.”
Except that only two out of four players from Verstappen’s team went offline, thus not being able to benefit from this break from the organisers.
“It’s incompetence”
You can often tell a competitor by his hatred of defeat. Furious, Max Verstappen commented on the retirement to Redline’s Twitch channel:
“It’s bad luck, or just incompetence. They can’t even control their game. This is the third time I’ve been disconnected from this race, this is the last time I’ll participate. This is a joke! It’s better to pull the car out, rather than drive for six hours for 15th place, it doesn’t make sense to anyone after all the effort the team put in.”
“I’m going to uninstall this game”
The Dutch driver and two-time Formula 1 world champion then had some harsh words for the game:
“I really hope the organisers will consider changing the platform because on this one (the RFactor 2 game) it doesn’t work at all. I think I’m going to uninstall the game to make some space on my computer.”
Studios responded to Max Verstappen: “A full investigation will be conducted and the findings will be announced in due course.”
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It’s not “ahuge rant” but a statement fuelked emotion and frustration. Max was leading by a minute, server issues caused the connection to go down and his car then enters the pits. Connection restored and he finds himself in 17th place 4 laps off the lead. If this had happened in a real race where due to organiser issues a team was penalised like this , it would be from a lot more people then the driver that “rants” would have emanated. What would you expect a driver to do when this happens.
I wonder if those connection issues could be cause by his own internet connection? Does anyone know if the issue was at the servers? Of somewhere on the line?