Minutes before the incident: Pagenaud's car, left, alongside Graham Rahal's in the center while Norris approaches on the right in the orange car.
Because sim racing does not have the same physical stakes, any driver may feel free to sabotage a sim event at any time. Which means the only way to have a sim series featuring pro drivers is going to be with rules enforcement that bears on drivers’ real-world careers. Otherwise, the future of competitive sim racing will be closer to that of any kind of celebrity competition or all-star event: something where the game fundamentally doesn’t matter to its participants, and which is only notable for the personalities on display.But even if that’s all Indycar wanted or needed from their iRacing invitational series, the personalities displayed during the Indianapolis event put a terrible face on a racing series that has spent years clawing its way back out of NASCAR’s and F1’s shadows and regaining the elite status it had in the 1990s. The lasting impression of the Indycar iRacing event is one of resentful second-raters whose sense of fair play extends exactly as far as their chances to win. For those within Indycar, it’s raised uncomfortable questions about how well the drivers really know each other and how much they can be trusted. When they're back at Indy in the real world, what will Pagenaud's competitors think when they see him up ahead? What will they expect from Ferrucci when he appears in the rearview mirror? The iRacing event was just a game but sports are always just games. It’s the people who are real.Maybe some people aren’t taking it seriously, they just think it’s a game, it doesn’t matter, but… there’s still a lot of other drivers—I had Jarv and the engineers and the guys doing the strategy. We still put time into it. Whether or not we’re at home doing nothing, they’re still working and trying to do things. They could be doing other things with their family, say. They’re still wanting to take part in this and have a bit of fun and try and win a race still. And yeah, some guys, they just get all selfish. And don’t care about any of it.