Up Next
A sim racer driving a real-world racing car.
You've heard that story before, right? You already know sim racers are good enough to drive real-world cars and perform well. The virtual world is close enough to reality now and the best of them are adaptable enough to drive a high-end GT car or go toe-to-toe with Formula 1 champions at the Race of Champions in electric rallycross cars on snow and ice.
But what about a sim racer getting behind the wheel of an actual F1 car? And not just any F1 car, but a V8-engined monster that Sebastian Vettel used to win his third world championship in 2012.
That's exactly the challenge Red Bull set one of its leading sim racers when it tasked Sebastian Job with driving its RB8 at the Red Bull Ring in October this year.
The 24-year-old spoke to The Race to explain how he prepared via a classic UK circuit and some coaching from a former F1 driver.
'Nobody is signing off on this'
Red Bull has long taken sim racing more seriously than any other F1 team having a large pool of sim racers, a four-time F1 champion in Max Verstappen who is a huge sim racing proponent, and a partnership with Verstappen's Team Redline that's produced two titles in the last year.
It also recognises the value a sim racer can have on its real-world F1 project. In fact, Job had just finished his simulator support for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last weekend when he spoke to The Race and has prior experience of supporting Red Bull's real-world F1 team.
There had been talk for years about putting Job in a real-world F1 car and earlier this year that became a reality, much to Job's amazement.
"My first thought was, 'I really hope this happens' because it didn't sound real to me. I was like, 'it's a really cool project but nobody is signing off on that'," Job tells The Race.
The road to the F1 test started with a day at Snetterton aboard the Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car that Job has driven to so much success in the virtual world, winning the Porsche Esports Carrera Cup GB series in three of the last four years.
"Craziest of all was how similar it felt compared to the sim," Job explains.
"Originally in the first couple of sessions, I was braking a bit too aggressively because generally in real life you have to brake a bit more aggressively than on the sim. But in this car, it hasn't got ABS and it doesn't require much brake pressure to have a lock-up.
"So I kind of dialled everything back a bit, drove like I would on iRacing [the sim racing platform] and I just started seeing green on the delta everywhere, it just felt so much like the game in that sense.
"It was quite incredible. I did a race stint test with them and they were looking at the times and the times were the same as what the race winner did the last time these cars raced there in 2022."
Job isn't a complete novice to real-world racing. He's had various prize drives from his sim racing successes but bar a sole season of Formula Ford - earned by winning the 2018 JMR scholarship in a Project CARS 2 competition - this was his first proper real-world car racing experience.
"When I first started Formula Ford I was a bit taken aback and blown away by it and that put me on the back foot of being afraid of the car a little bit," Job says.
"Whereas this time it was OK, [I knew] that's what it is, so I just had to get on with it and do the task at hand."
Impressing at Snetterton was critical to showing Red Bull that Job was ready to step things up a gear.
Neck preparations
With his F1 debut confirmed for the end of October, Job headed to the Red Bull Athlete Performance Centre in Salzburg to understand where he needed to improve physically.
"I knew already going into that, that my neck wasn't going to be strong enough," Job says.
"We did the neck strength test and my sides were not strong enough but that was OK, I could work on that, but then the front and back I was having this pain in the back of my head to the point where we couldn't even do the tests because it was so painful.
"I wasn't used to putting that sort of load into my neck so that was sort of a kick up the arse, you've got to start training your neck really properly now.
“I was putting everything into it, my whole body was shaking with how much force I was trying to put into my neck.
"Only then did I realise OK, our necks are very strong. We can train very hard as long as you build up to it."
Job had one month to prepare thereafter and had no major neck pain when the big day dawned...
A surprising biggest challenge
On October 31, Job arrived at the Red Bull Ring ready to drive the car he'd watched Vettel win the F1 title with as a 12-year-old.
"On the morning there were quite a bit of nerves but it was more that I was excited which is a really good thing because if I'm nervous I might not drive well," Job adds.
"But I was excited because I knew I'd put in the work physically and I was like: this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I just want to enjoy it as much as I can."
Job was assisted throughout the day by ex-F1 driver Patrick Friesacher, a long-time Red Bull athlete and no stranger to helping Red Bull pull off ambitious demonstration runs.
The day started with Friesacher taking Job for a passenger lap in a road car before driving two different single-seaters to prepare Job for driving the F1 car.
First up, Job had multiple runs in a Formula 4 car, the first couple of which he followed Friesacher on.
Surprisingly, the F4 car proved to be "the hardest part of the day" because of the lingering fog, and the lack of tyre warmers leaving grip at a premium on the cold Red Bull Ring circuit.
"We were just weaving for five, six, seven laps non-stop trying to get heat into the tyres and we couldn't do it," Job says.
"It meant in those conditions, I had no confidence. I had no idea what the grip level was.
"I even had a spin in the first session because I touched the inside kerb at the final corner and just looped straight away."
By the end of his third run in the F4 car, when the weather had improved, Job had taken on feedback from Freisacher such as not to be too aggressive on throttle and then "it finally felt like a race car" again.
Next up was a 500bhp Formula Renault 3.5 car, a monster of a car that's about as close as you can get to a V8-era F1 car in Europe.
It wasn't the most comfortable ride as Job came across the very real-world racing problem of not having his seating position quite right - something present across many of the rookies hopping into F1 cars in Abu Dhabi last weekend.
But driving-wise Job felt "so much more comfortable driving that than the F4 car. After five laps I was confident I could go onto the RB8".
"Once we had heat in the tyres it felt just like sim racing again."
F1 test time
Then it was time for Job to board the RB8 and feel the full power of a championship-winning F1 car.
"[It's] just absolutely mental in terms of the feeling of power you get through the car," Job says of the RB8.
"The thing that kind of caught me out first was I pulled out of the pitlane and the sound of it, the acceleration, everything in my body is like, 'lift off, lift off!' and I've got to power through that to get used to the feeling because if I don't get used to it, I'm going to be scared to put the throttle down."
The Red Bull Ring isn't an easy circuit for a debut either. The uphill Turn 3 right-hander is, as Job puts it, "a scary one because you're going up to this corner way faster than I've ever driven in my life and I get past the 150-metre board and I'm like, 'don’t brake yet, don’t brake' and it’s a strange thing to have to force your body to not brake".
"It felt normal by the end of the day."
He completed 10 laps across a series of short runs, not too dissimilar to the mileage in the first part of an F1 qualifying session there.
"I can carry it with me for 50 years and can always say, 'I've driven a championship-winning F1 car' and I'm super grateful for that," Job said.
"It's not just like they let me do it for one lap and that be it just for content or something. I got a good few laps in, I was able to push to a decent degree, I had a big lock-up.
"I wasn't pushing much on exits because the last thing I want to do is have a snap and go off into the gravel but in Turn 3 there's loads of run-off so I can push aggressively on the brakes.
"Where I could I was pushing quite hard and that's very different to just driving behind the safety car or something, not being allowed to push.
"So it's something I'll never forget because it just blows your mind when you do it. I struggled to remember it to be honest because it's not something…I can't experience that [again].
"There's nothing else I've done in my life that's been close to that level. I just want to do it again but I've got that with me for life now."
Job was speaking to The Race ahead of the release of a Red Bull documentary Game to Glory: Level Up on December 10. The four-part docuseries details Job's journey to driving the RB8, and is available on the Red Bull Racing YouTube channel
