CHENNAI: Last Sunday, former Formula 2 racer Arjun Maini won a tightly-contested race weekend. But how is that possible, you ask, with no live racing event? Turns out, there are plenty going on. It’s just that none of them involve racers getting into an actual car.
With the lockdown confining them to their homes, some of India’s top racers are logging in online to quench their thirst for speed. But instead of an actual car, they have racing simulators. And bringing them all together are two familiar names — Armaan Ebrahim and Aditya Patel. The duo, who started the X1 Racing League last year, had already run an e-sports competition in connection with that event. So when the present circumstances came about, they realised that experience could be put to good use.
“I think that (running the e-sports section last season) was the most helpful bit,” says Aditya. “We wanted to use it as a marketing tool, but as we started doing it, we realised that it can be more than just that. So we gained a lot of experience from it. In fact, we wanted to go online with an e-sports tournament in July. That was our original plan going into Jan-Feb. But then, this happened and we had to quickly find a way around it, because we’re all sitting at home. We said, before that first lockdown was going to end, let’s do something. That’s why the target was to do it over the weekend. But now that the lockdown has been extended, we can plan for the next 2-3 weeks.”
The formula for the first event was pretty simple. They contacted ten of India’s best racers and ten gamers whom they had met while organising the e-sports event last year. An Instagram page by the name of ‘Ultimate E’ went up last week, announcing the event and details, including the results and where they were live-streaming it. “Last week, we did a game called Assetto Corsa,” says Armaan. “It involved GT Cars and it pitted race drivers against gamers. That actually turned out to be a bit more interesting than what we expected. We had a three-day race weekend — Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We had a mix of good drivers, Arjun, Karthik Tharani, Sohail Shah and Adwait Deodhar. Then, we had a bunch of gamers, some of India’s best. And it was fun to watch.
“This week, we’re doing Formula One, because we want to increase our reach as well. We already have 17 participants. We are stopping at that because we want to reach out to a whole bunch of people. What we’re doing is, we’re going online and we’ll open up a lobby from Wednesday night till Saturday, every night for two hours. Anyone can come and participate, we’ll tell them the details through Instagram. At the end of it, the people with the top three lap times get to participate in the championship on Saturday and Sunday.”
For some of the racers, it was a much-needed release. Multiple-time national champion Vishnu Prasad is spending 4-5 hours a day on his simulator. “Almost all the drivers have the simulator at home nowadays, so it’s quite easy for them to access it,” says the JK Tyre driver. “You get to race with friends, so it’s fun. You learn a lot.”
“I struggled a bit,” laughs Karthik, who finished eighth in the final standings. “It was on a game that I did not have any practice before. It was a huge learning experience and I hope I have some more practice before the next event. But it was fun getting back together.”
Fun was certainly one part of the objective, with last weekend serving as a trial run, Aditya is already thinking aloud as to how to make this bigger in the future. “The race has already been watched by around 1100 people and this is with zero promotion. We’ve spoken to a few channels, we’re just hoping they come back to us.
“We hadn’t done anything when we spoke to them. But now we’ve done it, and we had it on Twitch and YouTube. The response from the audience on the live chat was great. We do plan on introducing some prize money as well.”