Le Mans Virtual investigating issues following Verstappen criticism

A fortnight ago, Max Verstappen competed in the virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans with Team Redline. However, this ended in a fiasco as Verstappen suddenly suffered a disconnection at night due to a security breach. The organisers are now revisiting the incident.

Verstappen quit the race after failing to regain his position and lost laps. The organisers, rFactor 2 and Studio 397, said in a statement to be aware of the fact that certain IP addresses were accidentally made public, but do not think it was a malicious cyber attack that caused the Dutchman to lose his connection.

Organisers aim to rectify problems

The organisers once again apologise to all participants, but Verstappen himself had already made it clear after the incident that he would never want to participate in the event again. rFactor and Studio 397 say they are working hard to fix the technical problems:

"Whilst we have made significant improvements and bug fixes to the multiplayer code of the game in recent years, we are clearly still experiencing problems with legacy low-level networking code. Naturally, this is an unacceptable situation for any multiplayer environment, and we are committed to rewriting this code over the coming months to ensure a better experience for all players."

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how successful the virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans will remain now that drivers such as the F1 world champion are unhappy with the organisers' actions and claim they will no longer participate.