Max Verstappen is an avid sim racer who takes his virtual driving as seriously as his racing on the track. That being said, the three-time F1 world champion is yet to hit the elusive 10,000 iRating score on the popular sim-racing title iRacing. In an interview with Red Bull eSports driver, Jarno Opmeer, the Dutchman explained why.
iRating is pretty much the measure of how good a racing driver is on iRacing. The ratings are calculated based on the previous race results. If a sim-racer beats people with a higher iRating, their score tends to grow quicker.
Speaking to Opmeer in a video on his YouTube channel, Verstappen explained why he hasn’t been able to achieve a 10,000 iRating yet. The Red Bull driver stated that while his schedule is quite hectic because of his F1 duties, he also is yet to seriously focus on achieving the 10k score.
NOT THE OFFICIAL IRACING ACCOUNT POSTING THIS pic.twitter.com/ZOUyallwRI
— Verstappen News (@verstappenews) May 19, 2024
He said, “Actually this plan [of hitting 10K iRating] has been in the making for a while. Every time that I want to commit I somehow just get too lazy and I let my teammates just grind a little bit more!
“The thing is in the off-season I go on holidays, then you come back and you don’t really have the time to prepare well.”
The endurance competitions that Verstappen enters on iRacing are locked by a certain threshold of iRating. Therefore, he pushes his teammates to increase their ratings instead of putting the time himself. This allows the team’s average score to be enough to enter these virtual racing events like the virtual Le Mans.
Nevertheless, Verstappen is eager to get his score up soon. As things stand, the benchmark on iRacing is 11,000 as only two drivers have managed to score 11k or more — Sven Haase and Maximilian Benecke.
