Daniel Abt, a German Formula E driver, made someone else drive in his name in the recently held eSport race.

The 27-year-old driver is racing for Audi (the Abt family via Abt Sportsline has been involved with the marque for the past three decades), and in the previous races of the Unicef-supporting Race at Home Challenge, he was way off the pace, not getting a better position than the fifteenth. However, in the fifth race of the series, he suddenly was fast: early in the race, he took the lead in Berlin before finishing third.

The problem is that Abt wasn’t behind the wheel – if you look at the video below at 1:06:24, you’ll see all the drivers via their cameras (including some who also were present in F1, such as Stoffel Vandoorne, Brendon Hartley, Pascal Wehrlein, André Lotterer, Felipe Massa, or Jean-Eric Vergne). The one exception is Abt, whose face isn’t visible, and for a good reason: the 18-year-old, also Audi-backed eSports driver called Lorenz Hörzing was racing in the name of Abt, and by analysing the IP addresses, the Formula E board quickly found out that Abt was cheating.

Abt not only got disqualified, but he also has to pay ten thousand euros to charity, and Hörzing was also banned from related virtual races. „I would like to apologize to Formula E, all of the fans, my team and my fellow drivers for having called in outside help during the race on Saturday. I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. I’m especially sorry about this because I know how much work has gone into this project on the part of the Formula E organisation,” Abt wrote in a statement.

The digital races are used by MotoGP, and even Formula 1, too. The younger generation of F1 (especially Charles Leclerc, Alex Albon, George Russell, Lando Norris) streams pretty much every day on Twitch, and sometimes it ends with laughter fits. They also take the races seriously, but they can be found having fun now and then.

Source: PCGamesN

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