Max Verstappen drops bold F1 competition verdict compared to his sim racing endeavors

Max Verstappen has made a very bold claim about sim racing, as he feels that it might be even harder than F1 in real life. Unlike his predecessors, who were more into go-karts as something they used to keep their reflexes sharp, Verstappen belongs to a generation that is immersed in sim racing.

The Red Bull driver even has a sim racing team named "Team Redline" with which he takes part in events. He is not the only one, as drivers like Lando Norris, George Russell, Charles Leclerc, and Alex Albon often used to take part in sim racing events as well.

While his fellow competitors have slowly taken a step back from sim racing, Max Verstappen still continues to be an avid participant with multiple events coinciding with the F1 races as well. Some of the more noteworthy ones last season were when the Dutch driver took part in a sim race during the Imola GP race weekend, while the one that caught the most eyes was during the F1 Hungarian GP, where the driver didn't have the best of races.

According to many, sim racing is viewed as a bit of a hobby, but Max Verstappen disagrees. In conversation with the Athletic, the driver even asserted that the competition in sim racing is arguably more than in real life. He said

“Everyone always thinks that it’s just a game and it’s fun, easy going. But I would say the competition is just as hard, or even harder, to nail — to win — than in real life.”

Max Verstappen on being loyal and building a team not named after him

Verstappen drives with the team "Team Redline". The driver could have used his name and built a 'Team Verstappen,' but the Dutchman says that he values and appreciates the friendships that he has. If he had built his different team, then he would have taken people from the squad, and he didn't want to do that. He said,

“I’m a loyal person. I really appreciate friendship a lot. I could have set up my own team under my own name. I didn’t want to do that because we had such a good group of people at Team Redline that I was like, ‘I don’t want them to then come to me. I want everyone to stay in a structure.’”

He added,

“I said, you guys started it all, and I find it very important that everyone stays on and, you know, everyone is in their own role, but we keep this winning team – because they were when I joined. They were already incredibly successful. I said, ‘But if you really want to be successful for the long term, I need to be more involved, and when I’m going to invest in it, we go all the way’, and that’s basically what happened at one point.”

Max Verstappen has been at the forefront of the sim racing revolution in F1 and it would be interesting to see if he inspires the next generation to do the same.