Virtual Le Mans understands Verstappen: 'But that would be very unfair'

The virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans promised to be sizzling beforehand, but technical problems ended up putting a big stain on the event. For instance, Max Verstappen even decided to quit and not participate in the future because his team lost a lot of positions after a malfunction. In the coming period, the organisers will start mapping out what went wrong, they told GPblog.

"There's no denying that we had technical issues during the event but 37 out of the 45 cars finished the 24 hour race" the communications department states, noting that this is a higher percentage than in 2022. "Everyone else who had disconnection problems restarted. We compwlty understand everyone's frustrations, and will be doing a detailed analysis on why the problems occurred and how to percent them from happening again."

Organisation sticks to regulations

However, the necessary is already clear to them. For example, it faced serious server problems early in the race. After an initial investigation, it appears that some race participants accidentally shared the IP addresses connecting them to the server with the public, which is not supposed to happen. It therefore faced some security problems, which caused the system to go down several times.

When four or more people are affected by an outage at the same time, the race management will give back the lost time. However, with a smaller number, the regulations do not allow them to do so as it is difficult to prove where the fault lies. It resulted in Verstappen's Team Redline not getting the places back.

"We obviously feel very sorry for all affected competitors including Max Verstappen, and understand their frustration, but we cannot change the regulations mid-race, even if it's for a double World Champion who we fully respect, as this would be very unfair on all the other competitors."