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Formula E Driver Caught Using Using Professional E Sports Driver To Race For Him Online


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You can't make this shit up

 

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Formula E driver Daniel Abt was disqualified and ordered to pay £8,900 to charity for getting a professional gamer to compete under his name in an official esports race. Organisers also took away all points won to date by the 27-year-old German in the Race at Home Challenge series. Lorenz Horzing, who competed for Abt, finished third in Saturday's race behind Britain's Oliver Rowland and Belgian ex-F1 driver Stoffel Vandoorne. Abt later apologised. "I did not take it as seriously as I should have," he said. "I am especially sorry about this because I know how much work has gone into this project on the part of the Formula E organisation. I am aware that my offence has a bitter aftertaste but it was never meant with any bad intention." Vandoorne suspected Abt was not driving and French racer Jean-Eric Vergne asked the German to turn his video on in the next race so they could confirm it was him.

 

We live in strange, strange times.

 

IGN has a little more Info

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This is so strange. I've watched a bunch of these eSport races with professional drivers in them and while pure racing skill has some place in the sim world, it's quite clear that there's a sim specific skill that not all drivers have. There are great IRL racing drivers that end up with pretty middling or even terrible results in these esport races, and presumably that's what this guy was trying to avoid, but so what? Just steal a line from one of the old guys and say you haven't spent enough time with this game or this rig or that you haven't yet adapted to sim racing in general yet. Not that I think any of those guys are lying, it's just the way things really are. There's no shame in not being as good at sim driving as you are in a real car, and your livelihood is still going to depend on the former, so suck it up dude. 

 

Also, it's interesting that Vandoorne (who I think is good enough to still be in F1) was able to tell that it wasn't the same guy racing.

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22 hours ago, TwinIon said:

This is so strange. I've watched a bunch of these eSport races with professional drivers in them and while pure racing skill has some place in the sim world, it's quite clear that there's a sim specific skill that not all drivers have. 

There is a lot of feedback that you receive in a car "through your backside" that allow you to drive a car closer to the limit that just doesn't exist in a sim rig.

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18 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

There is a lot of feedback that you receive in a car "through your backside" that allow you to drive a car closer to the limit that just doesn't exist in a sim rig.

We will never reach realism until we get 'butt haptic feedback'.  

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29 minutes ago, AbsolutSurgen said:

There is a lot of feedback that you receive in a car "through your backside" that allow you to drive a car closer to the limit that just doesn't exist in a sim rig.

Absolutely, which is why I don't think a real driver needs to feel badly about not performing well enough in a sim race. Obviously these are competitive people that want to win, but when the stakes are so low, and a loss isn't necessarily a comment on your actual skill, it seems so incredibly unnecessary to cheat. 

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Here's the thing. 

 

A lot of people treat these things like video games. And they are... but most of the professional racers participating in these treat them like real races. Or at the very least like real simulations--which they normally use to train for real races. So this is likely an outlier and I don't anticipate this happening again. But I think this is just a bump in the road for iRacing becoming more embraced as legitimate EVENTS in the racing world. 

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