The crazy world of F1 esports - Part 1
- Marco Bise
- May 15, 2024
- 5 min read
On the 9th of May 2024, we witnessed the last round of the 2023 F1 Esports season, the F1 Sim Racing World Championship.
Amid contractual problems with the organiser, technical troubles and much more, in this ‘mini-series’ of articles we look back at the problems and highlights of the championship that crowned Frederik Rasmussen as world champion for the first time in his career.
What is the F1 Simracing World Championship?
It is important to make a few clarifications for those who don't follow e-sports.
The series was born in 2017. It is now in its seventh season and is designed to be a real virtual F1 championship, raced on F1 23, the official video game of motorsport's most elite category.
The 10 real-life Formula 1 teams, through their esports teams, field three drivers each - two starters and one reserve - from among the fastest sim drivers in the world.
This year the races were held live on the LAN - in Jönköping - for the first time since the start of the covid pandemic, and broadcast on the official F1 channels on Twitch.
The schedule? We'll come back to that later, but there will be laughter - or tears, depending on your point of view.
What does it mean to race on a LAN?
In e-sports racing on a LAN means that all players, in this case sim drivers, find themselves physically in the same place, usually an arena, and are all connected to the same network. LAN means exactly Local-Area Network.
This helps to address lag issues (the late transmission of data packages between the different PC), but also creates a far more engaging atmosphere for both players and spectators.
Focus on F1 23
As mentioned above, the simulator of choice for the series is F1 23. This is the fifteenth release in the official sim series developed by Codemasters, in collaboration with the giant EA Sports, and the simulation experience it offers is... let's say ‘so and so’ - and here, as a sim racing enthusiast, I am forced to put ‘so and so’ in several quotes, because at the end of the day it’s more of a casual-arcade than a real sim. But better move on now.
The races are run with a function that allows the performance of the various cars to be equalised, thus allowing the focus to be exclusively on the drivers' skills, ignoring the technical differences between the various single-seaters.
A sort of balance of performance if you wish. But unlike the original one it works. So if you want to see a Haas beat a Red Bull you know what championship to watch next year.
First problems
Unfortunately, however, the positives of F1 23 end there.
Fifteen years after the release of the first title in the series, in fact, Codemasters has delighted us with a software and server platform as stable as a house of cards.
And to make sure we don't miss anything, let's add a hardware side provided by the organisation that isn't exactly top-notch, which is unacceptable if you decide to race on a LAN, but there you go.
The result is therefore an explosive mix: numerous sim drivers reported continuous screen freezes, others found their steering wheel disconnected from the computer without any warning, losing control of the car, and there were even cases of drivers ejected from race sessions out of nowhere.
Just think that Jarno Opmeer - official Mercedes driver since 2021 and two-time world champion - was forced to say goodbye to the third title precisely because the game ghosted him during the last event.
These ‘slight’ hiccups not only tested the mental stability of drivers, who were already under extreme stress, but also undermined the confidence needed to push hard and extract every thousandth out of the virtual cars.
But as we shall see, these are not the only problems that have affected the series.
Ready, set, go... or maybe not?
The championship officially started on the 25th of November 2023, but without any promotion. To put it simply, nobody knew anything about it. Remember the story of the phantom calendar? Well, now it's getting serious. Why? Simple: the calendar... Didn't exist!
Or rather, in theory the calendar was there, but it only provided for one initial event with two races (Bahrain and Jeddah), with no additional information.
The opening race was scheduled for the 24th, not the 25th. And the Jeddah race? There was no sign of it anywhere.
Strange, isn't it? Something must be going on...
And indeed, there was something wrong: it turns out that even the drivers were in the dark, not knowing whether or not they were going to race until just before the start.
The reason? Contractual issues and sponsorship conflicts between Fanatec (official supplier of the game’s accessories, i.e. steering wheels and pedals), Formula 1, the organiser ESL and the various teams.
Problems arose when some drivers refused to show Fanatec equipment on-camera - which in the past has not proven to be exactly reliable - because it conflicted with their team sponsors.
This resulted in Formula 1 refusing to pay travel expenses to the teams, who thus found themselves 30 drivers plus various engineers and analysts to be sent to Jönköping, Sweden, on their own budget without prior warning. Who knows if they tried hitchhiking.
Marcel Kiefer, a former Red Bull driver who has moved into the commentary box, expressed his frustration: ‘What is happening “in the background” is quite devastating for all drivers and team members who work so hard to keep this going.’
Revised schedule
The problems were only resolved in early 2024, when the new official calendar was finally released, updated for subsequent events.
Calendar that can be summed up in a single word: terrifying.
Don't get me wrong, not because of the tracks chosen, but because of the inexplicable pile-up of races one after the other..
Why? It may seem strange to an observer, but you always have to remember that even in the e-sports world you're after every single thousandth, just like in real F1.
Especially when there is a gap of no more than two tenths between first and last on the grid.
So you have to consider all the work of drivers, engineers and analysts, who take months to prepare a single race. And, as the organiser, what do you do?
You put six races in three days in April and five races in three days in May.
Despite the troubled path of the series, the action on the track has nevertheless been interesting and full of twists and turns, between fierce rookies and struggling champions.
We will analyse it more closely in the next article in this ‘mini-series’, coming in just a few days.
Stay tuned, we’re going to see some exciting stuff!
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