Max Verstappen has spent another weekend away from grand prix duty, but his mind rarely leaves the virtual track for long. Ahead of the GT World Challenge Europe finale at Portimao on October 17, he has explained exactly why his Max Verstappen sim rig setup skips the pricey motion platforms that plenty of his rivals swear by. He trusts a static rig instead, and he says it’s simply faster.
Verstappen will share the No. 3 Mercedes-AMG GT3 with Chris Lulham and Ben Barnicoat at Portimao, lining up against Valentino Rossi’s WRT-run BMW on the same grid. The build-up has turned attention toward how he actually prepares between races, and the answer sits inside his motorhome rather than on a simulator showroom floor.
The Motorhome Setup and Hardware Philosophy
Team Redline, the sim racing outfit Verstappen helped build, constructs a portable rig inside his motorhome on race weekends. The centrepiece is a Sim-Lab P1-X cockpit, chosen because it travels well and goes together quickly between circuits without needing a workshop.
He doesn’t chase the big motion platforms some drivers run at home. Asked about it on Team Redline’s YouTube channel, he laid out his thinking plainly: “I’m driving at home on a static rig because it’s faster. All these kinds of motion rigs are slower but of course, if you want to try and replicate a little bit of what you feel in real life, then yeah, you buy a motion rig. But I think it’s not really necessary at the moment.”
That’s the whole argument in one go. He wants grip feedback and clean data, not the tilt and shake of a hydraulic rig trying to copy real inertia. Between grands prix, iRacing is the software he leans on to stay sharp, a tool he was mastering long before Red Bull ever put him in an F1 seat.
Brake Pedals, Sim-Lab Cockpits, and Real-World Overlap
Speaking to Car and Driver earlier this year, Verstappen gave a rarer look at what actually matters on a rig like this. “It’s pretty custom, and you can buy it all online, but you get into some personal settings as well,” he said, describing how far he tunes the equipment to suit his own feel rather than taking it off the shelf.
Asked which single part counts most, he didn’t hesitate. “The most important to get right is the brake pedal,” he told the outlet. You can read the full exchange in his interview on sim rig setups.
He followed that with the second non-negotiable. “And the wheelbase. Those are probably the most important parts aside from a good computer, but for me, those are the most important things to get right if you want to be really competitive,” he said. For a driver whose day job demands millimetre-precise braking, that overlap between the Max Verstappen sim rig and a real cockpit isn’t a coincidence. It’s the whole point.
From Virtual Lap Times to Portimao Track Battles
Verstappen’s interest in realistic hardware isn’t just about shaving his own lap times. Team Redline’s wider project is turning fast sim racers into genuine professionals, and he talks about it with real ambition. “My dream is of having a sim driver move into the real world and making it a success story, and seeing him progress, and seeing him evolve, hopefully in the long term, make him basically a professional driver,” he told The Athletic.
He went further on what success actually looks like. “That he can make his living off it. That is the goal, and that’s something that slowly we’re making ways in,” he said. It’s a long game, built on the same rigs and the same data he uses himself.
Portimao brings that philosophy onto real asphalt. Verstappen’s GT3 outing arrives in the gap between grand prix commitments, not long after our recent analysis of Verstappen’s form and his track performance comments from Baku. Rossi’s WRT BMW gives the weekend a genuine celebrity edge, but Verstappen’s co-drivers, Lulham and Barnicoat, carry the bulk of the stint work across the race. For a man who insists a static rig makes him faster, Portimao is the chance to prove the theory holds up away from the screen too.
