World’s Fastest Gamer pits the best gamers in the world against amateur virtual drivers, across multiple racing platforms, as they battle it out to become the ultimate ‘champion of champions’.

World’s Fastest Gamer is a partnership between global sports and technology brand McLaren and Millennial Esports – through the founder of virtual motorsport’s GT Academy, Millennial’s Chief Marketing Officer, Darren Cox.

The competition has been put together in collaboration with founding partner Logitech G, a global leader in gaming gear and two further partners – sports media platform GIVEMESPORT and Esport racing innovator Sparco.

From short films to hours of live streaming, World’s Fastest Gamer has redefined how racing esports is broadcast to fans. The competition has already seen over 10 million views and unprecedented levels of engagement. With non-stop coverage, the Finals Week is expected to beat all industry records to become one of the most watched esport racing events ever. Fans can follow all the WFG Finals Week action on WFG Twitter, McLaren’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels and website and via media partner GIVEMESPORT’s Facebook page.

Over 30,000 players entered the WFG competition, and after rounds of heats, the 12 finalists will meet for the first time on 11 November and go head-to-head in Finals Week – a series of physical, mental, track and virtual challenges to find out who has the skills to claim the ultimate prize. They will need to demonstrate their engineering know-how, ability to work as part of a team and display the mental and physical strengths required for the position.

The winner will be offered a one-year contract with McLaren as a simulator driver, working with engineers at the McLaren Technology Centre in the UK, feeding into the technology used in the real world by the team’s drivers, Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne, at grand prix circuits across the globe.

The Finalists are:

• David Hoch (USA), 23, qualified
• Rudy Van Buren (The Netherlands), 25, qualified
• Yordi Maldonado (Mexico), 20, qualified
• Henrik Drue (Denmark), 34, qualified
• Isaac Price (UK), 22, qualified
• Freek Schothorst (The Netherlands), 20, qualified
• Aurélien Mohammedi-Mallet (France), 23, panel selection
• Bono Huis (The Netherlands), 23, panel selection
• David Le Garff (France), 40, panel selection
• Greger Huttu (Finland), 37 panel selection
• Harry Jacks (UK), 22, panel selection
• Ryan Moore (USA), 22, panel selection

Click here to download images of finalists

The Qualifying Events:                                   

Six of the finalists were selected in qualifying events across a number of platforms including:

• PC racing sim, rFactor 2: the Silverstone qualifying race clocked up 2,540 individual lap times over 10,600 hours with the coverage reach exceeding 30 million.
• Free-to-play mobile game Gear.Club: McLaren increased the gaming audience by including free-to-play mobile game Gear.Club, making it possible to enter without a games console or computer. 26,166 entrants, out of which 24,075 competed, drove over 1,355,425,792 metres.
• Forza Motorsport 6: CJ Wilson Racing, a sportscar team based in Texas, organised this qualifying event. From hundreds of entrants, 32 drivers qualified and drove a total of 13,190 miles over 169 hours.
• Forza Motorsport 6: partner Logitech G held the only live qualifying events of the competition. The qualifying events comprised of four rounds held across the world at events such as Dreamhack in Sweden, Insomnia in the UK and IFA in Berlin. Over 1,000 gamers competed at the Insomnia and IFA events.

• Online PC racing sim, iRacing: qualification ran using the McLaren Honda MP4-30 car at iconic circuits such as Monza, Interlagos and the Circuit Of The Americas. A total of 803 drivers entered across 46 countries, driving a total distance of 83,170 miles or 24,392 laps.

A panel of experts pre-selected six additional finalists based on their careers so far in virtual racing. The panel included: Dom Duhan, Head of Team Redline esports Racing Team; Davide Brivio, Head of esports, Sparco; Andreas Schicker, Head of esports Business Development, Logitech; and Wolfgang Reip, GT Academy Winner/Simulator Coach.

For more information and to follow all the Finals Week action visit mclaren.com/wfg or via social media at WFG Twitter, McLaren Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or search using #WFGFinals.

Zak Brown
McLaren Technology Group Executive Director:

“We are proud that McLaren is the first F1 team to launch in esports. World’s Fastest Gamer is an exciting platform for us to bring motorsport and the sport of Formula 1 to a whole new audience, as well as traditional fans.

“The results have shown our instincts were right. Furthermore, with simulation now a well-established feature of modern racing operations, it is an interesting exercise in understanding the potential for esports to unearth future motorsport talent.”

Darren Cox
Founder of IDEAS+CARS
and CMO Millennial Esports:

“World’s Fastest Gamer has already massively exceeded expectations, both in terms of the interest we’ve had from the Industry and the level of views and engagement of our content.

“Millennial Esports is committed to creating quality, breakthrough content for esports – Worlds Fastest Gamer is one of the first solid examples of this strategy.

“By the end of season one, the content we have produced will have included short form, long form and live streaming allowing us to reach new, difficult to target audiences for McLaren and its partners. ”

LONDON, UK (Tuesday, August 15, 2016): Esports racing reached a new level of professionalism on Sunday with the first-ever live Esports stream promoted by Millennial Esports through IDEAS+CARS

Held in partnership with Silverstone Circuits, The Wing pit garages were used to provide the backdrop for this breakthrough event.

Professionals from traditional sports broadcasting and Esports came together to showcase the direction of future content in this fast growing space. Streamed via McLaren’s YouTube and Facebook channels, the event formed part of the qualifying process for the World’s Fastest Gamer competition.

Rudy van Buren proved to be the winner of the first of four rounds hosted at the home of British Motorsport, which featured significant support from McLaren on their social media channels and with the decorating of the temporary studios with a McLaren road car and current Formula 1 machine.

Click to to view recap from round 1 at Silverstone.

Millennial Esports CEO Alex Ingelman believes this is just the starting point for the next phase of esports racing content.

“Millennial Esports want to professionalise the esports racing scene to provide a more structured platform for brands to come into this space,” Ingelman said.

“This stream, and the next three over the next three weeks, will start to do that. I’d like to thank the teams from Silverstone and McLaren on behalf of our group for their support and vision in this space.”
Presenters Ben Constanduros and Matthew Trivett are from the worlds of motorsports and Esports respectively but came together for this broadcast and see that it is genre defining.

The experienced Constanduros has worked on broadcasts for major championships including Formula 1, FIA World Touring Car Championship, FIA World Endurance Championship, DTM  and key events including the Goodwood Festival of Speed and the “Race of Champions”.

“I was thrilled to be a part of the production because it not only raised the bar for Esports racing but the quality of the stream was as good as its real life counterparts,” Constanduros said.

Esports-caster Trivett believes the crossover between real sports and Esports is a rapidly growing opportunity.

“The unique thing about racing Esports is the skills required to race RFactor2 can easily transfer across to the real thing. That is not always the case with other genres,” Trivett said.

“The gaming industry is huge and growing fast but I’m really pleased to be a part of this production with Millennial Esports and IDEAS+CARS as this competition – and the quality of the production that is being used to showcase the races – can also excite the mainstream audience as well.”

The next round of McLaren’s World’s Fastest Gamer will be held next Sunday at 8:30pm (UK time) and will again be shown live at http://facebook.com/mclaren_racing, https://www.youtube.com/mclaren as well as in conjunction with GiveMeSport at https://www.facebook.com/GiveMeSport/