Last weekend saw the virtual 24-hour race at LeMans, attracting not only the esports elite but also world stars such as reigning two-time F1 world champion Max Verstappen. However, the intended festivities did not materialize and instead the race was marked by technical problems and DDoS attacks. Something that caused several red flags and the event had to be interrupted periodically due to people being disconnected. Something like happened Max Verstappen which caused him to ragequit completely and uninstall rFactor from his computer. The world champion subsequently described the event as a “clown show” in an interview with the Washington Post.
“We treat this like a real, live race, we’re fine-tuning the car’s setup and testing it in the hottest and coldest conditions, in rainy and dry weather, and in both night and day. There are weeks of preparation that go into this, and a lot of people don’t realize that.”
“Look at this. They call it amazingly bad luck. This is just incompetence. They can’t even control their own game. This is already the third time this happens to me now, that we get kicked off the game while doing this race .”
“You prepare for five months to try and win this championship, you’re leading the championship, you’re trying to win this race which you prepared for two months, and they handle it like this. I mean there have been two red flags , they blame it on, I don’t even know what, people DDoSing the server … Honestly, it’s a joke. You cannot call this an event. It’s a clown show.”
“I think I’m gonna uninstall the game, That’s nice. Frees up a bit of space on the PC anyway.”
In an interview after the race, event manager Gérard Neveu commented on the whole thing.
“It became clear within the first seven hours of the race that we had some serious server issues which led to us showing the red flag on the race twice,”
“After some initial investigation, it seems that some race competitors accidentally shared to the public the IP addresses connecting them to the server, which is not supposed to happen.”
“This put us in a weakened position, and we were subjected to some security breaches which caused the global disconnection of all competitors. It should never happen if the IP addresses are well protected.”
In the world champion’s absence, his remaining team consisting of Felipe Drugovich, Felix Rosenqvist, Luke Bennett, and Chris Lulham managed to narrowly win for the second year in a row. So a big congratulations to them. Max Verstappen on the other hand sounded really tired of it all and it remains to be seen if he returns next year, and you can’t blame him. Weeks of training straight into the lake due to technical problems really can’t be fun.
What do you think should be done about this kind of attacks, people who just want to destroy others.
