There is a photograph that circulated in 2020 showing Lando Norris sitting in a racing simulator at two in the morning before a Formula 1 race weekend. This was not a training exercise. It was not a team-mandated preparation session. Norris was simply playing because he did not want to stop. The story became a minor controversy — McLaren engineers reportedly had to intervene — but it captured something real about the current generation of Formula 1 drivers that no official team press release would ever say.
They are gamers. Not in the casual sense of someone who plays FIFA for an hour on a Sunday. Genuinely, seriously, obsessively engaged with video games and, in particular, with sim racing — the genre of driving simulation that has evolved over the past decade from a hobbyist's pastime into a training tool of genuine technical sophistication. The question of where the training ends and the recreation begins is, for many of these drivers, genuinely unclear. And that blurring is itself one of the more interesting stories in modern motorsport.
Lando Norris: The Streamer Who Also Happens to Race in F1
Norris is the most prominent example of a generation for whom gaming and motorsport have always existed on the same spectrum. He has been streaming on Twitch since before his Formula 1 debut, and his channel — which has accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers — is distinctly not a carefully managed brand exercise. He plays what he wants, talks to his chat directly, and treats the stream as an extension of his actual social life rather than a content strategy.
The games he plays are varied — iRacing, FIFA, various titles with friends from the racing world — but the sim racing sessions are taken with particular seriousness. Norris has competed in the iRacing online endurance series with enough genuine investment that the results matter to him independently of any marketing value they generate. He has spoken about the way online racing sharpens spatial awareness and tyre management intuition, and his competitors in those sessions — many of them dedicated sim racers without professional driving careers — confirm that he is fast, competitive, and notably resistant to losing.
His relationship with McLaren around this habit has been interesting to follow. The team has been broadly supportive of his streaming, recognising the audience reach it generates. The boundaries around race weekends have been negotiated rather than mandated, and Norris has spoken about learning to manage his own sleep and preparation in ways that accommodated both his love of gaming and his professional responsibilities. He is refreshingly candid about the tension: there was a period early in his career where he had to make adjustments, and he has said so directly.
Max Verstappen: Racing Is the Hobby, Sim Racing Is the Relaxation
Verstappen's relationship with gaming is in some ways more extreme than Norris's, because Verstappen's chosen relaxation activity is simply more of what he does professionally. He does not switch off from racing when he leaves the circuit. He goes home and races online.
He streams on Twitch under his own name, competes in the iRacing 24 Hours of Le Mans and other endurance events, and has described sim racing as genuinely restorative after a race weekend — which tells you something significant about how differently he is wired compared to, say, the drivers of the previous generation who needed to completely disconnect from cars to function. Michael Schumacher played football between seasons. Verstappen's equivalent is to sit in a simulator.
His results in online competitions are not celebrity-grade participation. He has qualified on the front rows of professional sim racing events, competed in oval series that are technically completely foreign to his Formula 1 background, and taken wins in competitions that draw serious dedicated sim racers rather than just famous names. The sim racing community's assessment of him is consistent: he is genuinely fast in the simulator, not just adequately good.
What makes this interesting from a Formula 1 perspective is the question of whether it contributes to his on-track dominance or whether it is simply an addictive personality expressing itself in a benign direction. Team performance coaches have varied views on this. Verstappen himself describes it as play, but play at the level of intensity that he brings to everything.
Charles Leclerc: Monaco, Music, and Midnight Sim Sessions
Leclerc grew up in Monaco and watched Formula 1 from the barriers before he raced on the same streets. By the time he was competing in real cars at the Monaco Grand Prix, he had already raced the circuit thousands of times in simulation. His relationship with sim racing predates his Formula 1 career in a way that is true of almost no driver before his generation.
He plays seriously and late. Social media posts from Leclerc's life in Monaco frequently show sim racing sessions that begin after midnight — a schedule that his Ferrari team has occasionally had to negotiate around. He has competed in the Race for the World charity sim racing event, which raised money during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns and featured most of the current grid, and his performances in those events against his fellow F1 drivers were among the strongest.
What distinguishes Leclerc's gaming from pure recreation is the degree to which he discusses it analytically. He has spoken about using simulation to understand circuits he is visiting for the first time, to test setup hypotheses before they are tried in real life, and to maintain the mental sharpness that race-specific concentration requires during off-season periods. Whether these rationales are complete explanations or post-hoc justifications for something he simply enjoys is an interesting question, but the analytical intelligence behind them is real.
Why This Generation Is Different
The drivers of the current Formula 1 grid grew up with sim racing as a serious discipline rather than a fringe hobby. The technical quality of modern simulators — the force feedback, the visual accuracy, the physics modelling — has reached a level where the skills transfer measurably between virtual and real machinery. The iRacing platform, which runs on subscription and takes its physics seriously, has been used as a genuine development tool by several Formula 1 teams, and its competitive endurance series is contested by drivers who are fast in any context.
For drivers like Norris, Verstappen, and Leclerc, the line between work and play is genuinely blurred, and the blurring goes in both directions. Racing is work, but it is also the thing they have always loved. Sim racing is play, but it is also serious competition. The result is a generation for whom the traditional athlete dichotomy — on season versus off season, training versus relaxing — simply does not apply in the usual way.
The paddock's relationship with this culture has evolved from initial concern to general acceptance. Teams have learned that they cannot simply ban their drivers from gaming, both because the drivers would not accept it and because the skill development arguments are real. The negotiation now is about boundaries: when before a race weekend, how late, what platform, how much. That negotiation is ongoing, and its outcomes will help define what professional racing drivers look like in the decades ahead.