Earlier today we reported that the winner had been decided for the World's Fastest Gamer competition, and that Rudy van Buren was the champion, and we caught up with him to ask about how much this meant to him, given his previous racing ambitions.
"I stopped go-karting around 2006, and that just closed my real-life racing book for that period, and you start doing sim racing as a replacement, out of pure fun basically," he told us. "[Sim] racing took a big explosion in how big it got in the last nine years, it grew a lot, it's still growing very fast, and then a competition like this came by, so then my own motorsport book got slightly open again and somewhat I'm at the point where I was almost always dreaming about."
We also spoke with McLaren's new director of esports Ben Payne as well, and we asked exactly what van Buren's job will entail:
"So yeah, Rudy is the newest member of our F1 sim racing team, and come January 1 he will be part of that setup, so he'll be set up in the sim, making sure the car is set up for race weekends," he said. "As you may or may not know, over the course of testing and then into the Grand Prix circuit itself the sim is on a lot to make sure that every potential setup is ready to give us every opportunity to succeed on the track, so Rudy will be an integral part of that over the 12 months come January 1."
"We will use him as well now that we're gonna do World's Fastest Gamer series 2, and Rudy will be a bit of a poster child for that, based on the fact that he's our first winner and he's worked so hard to get to this point and help us tell our story next year, but his day job will be to be part of that sim team."
What do you hope to see from the second season?