‘World’s Fastest Gamer’ eSport Competition Winner Gets McLaren F1 Simulator Job

Rudy van Buren, a 25-year-old sales manager from Lelystad in the Netherlands, has beaten more than 30,000 contestants to be crowned the World’s Fastest Gamer; the McLaren Formula 1 team’s ground-breaking esports competition that aims to find the best virtual racing driver on the planet.

In the final round of the contest, an exacting four-hour assessment using McLaren’s state-of-the-art Formula 1 simulator, van Buren beat countryman Freek Schothorst, a 20-year-old science, business and innovation student from Amsterdam.

Van Buren now claims the greatest job in esports, becoming one of the F1 team’s official simulator drivers for the 2018 season.

Van Buren began racing karts aged eight, ultimately winning the Dutch Karting Championship in 2003. However, like many budding talents, he was forced to quit at the age of 16 due to lacking the financial backing needed to progress further.

However, World’s Fastest Gamer, which identifies racing talent through esports, has given van Buren a second chance at his motorsports career.

To triumph, van Buren not only needed to demonstrate the speed and agility required by all top racing drivers, but also the engineering know-how and mental and physical ability required to develop, refine and engineer an F1 car for the team’s two race drivers, double world champion Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne.