Max Verstappen rage quits Le Mans Virtual after RFactor2 crashes mid-race

Max Verstappen, a two-time Formula One World Champion, took part in the Le Mans Virtual eSports event but, after multiple problems, the champion elected to drop out of the race and vowed to uninstall the simulator being used.

Le Mans Virtual 2022/2023 is a series of races that reached its conclusion with an endurance race on January 14. It’s 24-hour race, mimicking the real life race, with multiple drivers taking turns trying to rack up the most points for their team to win the entire series.

The platform for the entire event is RFactor2, “a realistic, easily extendable racing simulation” according to its Steam page.

Max Verstappen started the race off with a bang, overtaking 3 opponents to take the lead in spectacular fashion.

However, things quickly started going south, with the game crashing and holding up the entire event. Multiple individual players experienced the issues simultaneously, including Verstappen.

Almost 17 hours into the game, Max’s game crashed once again when he was in the lead.

Upon loading the game back up, he was down to 17th place. Another game crash saw a visibly angry Verstappen decide to quit the race altogether.

Community reaction to Max vowing to uninstall RFactor 2

“I think I’m gonna uninstall the game,” commented Max. “They can’t even, like, control their own game.”

“This is already the third time this happened to me now,” said Max in a separate clip.

Reactions under the Reddit thread featuring the clip are mostly in support of Max, criticizing the stability of the game and the event organizers.

“rFactor2 should never have been allowed to hosts this,” wrote one user. Another agreed, commenting: “I swear there are better sims out there that could of hosted this tournament no?”

Whether or not the organizers of Le Mans Virtual could have done things better or not is unclear, but angering the two-time world champion of Formula One is likely to bring some bad press their way.