The team behind Verstappen and Norris’ Le Mans Virtual charge

While Michael Schumacher was on his way to ending Ferrari's 21-year wait for a drivers championship in 2000, the foundations for what would become sim racing behemoth Team Redline were being laid.

At a time when Esports was a word barely uttered - let alone one really understood - young British gamer Dom Duhan discovered online racing and slowly established a small team with other drivers from around the world, who also found themselves at the top of online leaderboards for now beloved classic racing games such as TOCA 2 and Grand Prix Legends.

Among the first recruits was Finnish sim racing legend and five-time iRacing champion Greger Huttu, who will share a virtual ORECA 07 LMP2 car along with fellow Redline director Atze Kerkhof, Verstappen and Norris in the virtual edition of the endurance classic.

"It started nearly 20 years ago," Duhan recalls to Autosport. "I got a computer, my girlfriend helped me set it up - much to her dismay now. She showed me how to go online and download TOCA 2. I remember saying 'I can't believe this, you can race online against other people. It's incredible'.

"I got a steering wheel and pedals, entered a competition and started doing really well. I started going onto the Formula 1 games, and there I saw people like Greger Huttu. I had no idea who he was at the time, but I remember trading laps at the top of the hot lap leaderboards and saying 'hey man come and join me I've set up a team', and he did.

"Then we moved into rFactor and iRacing, that's where we started to get more and more names in the space entering the big world championships, the iRacing World Championships, and the scene has grown on and on from there. We've always competed in the highest level of whatever we've driven, whether that's hot laps or championships, and the competition has always been very tough."

Team Redline's success is not limited to the virtual racing sphere, however, as it assists multiple professional racing drivers with their real-world careers. One of the first examples of this was former Aston Martin factory driver and Supercar racer Richie Stanaway.

Prior to his Formula Renault 3.5 debut in 2012, the Kiwi had taken dominant championships wins in Germany's ADAC Formula Masters (roughly equivalent to F4 today) and Formula 3 categories in successive years and was regarded - alongside Jaguar Formula E racer Mitch Evans - as New Zealand's brightest young prospect racing in Europe.

"For several years and long before I joined, they've been the best and had some of the best drivers and have been winning several world championships" Lando Norris

But Stanaway's career suffered a major setback just three rounds into his maiden Formula Renault 3.5 season - one characterised by a thrilling title fight between Robin Frijns and Jules Bianchi - when he broke his back in a crash at Spa.

Duhan picks up the story: "He had to spend a year in recuperation, and he was using sim racing as a tool to stay sharp. He trained with Atze, who has worked a lot in top sport and is a part of the Dutch speed skating squad.

"Atze moved into sim racing and worked with Richie to develop him, and Richie went on to win the iRacing Pro Series, which is a huge achievement because that level is really high."

Stanaway's virtual success was followed by a triumphant return to real-life single-seater racing in GP3 and GP2, aided in the latter series by continuing his collaboration with long-time Redline engineer Diederik Kinds - then a race engineer for Status GP. After winning two GP2 sprint races for Status in 2015, the Kiwi went on to establish a career racing in the World Endurance Championship and Supercars.

This laid the foundations for Redline to work with numerous professional drivers, with Verstappen and Norris the most high-profile.

Verstappen joined during his maiden F1 season in 2015, while a year later Norris - well on his way to the Formula Renault Eurocup title - started competing with Redline after spending many years admiring "how accurate and just how fast" its sim racers were.

"For several years and long before I joined, they've been the best and had some of the best drivers, and have won several world championships," Norris tells Autosport. "When I joined sim racing, I was doing it on my own and with some friends and stuff like that. So when I decided to take it a bit more seriously they were the guys.

"When I would see the [sim racing] championships, these were the guys that were winning the races, and those are the guys that I looked up to in terms of sim racing. They were the guys I really wanted to learn from.

"It was really cool for me to be able to join, especially then I was in Formula Renault, so I had won some races and I was doing well at that point, but I wasn't like I am now in F1 having a lot more fans and stuff like that.

"It was a really good opportunity for me to learn from a lot of very good guys, and I think that was the main reason for joining them, to get more of an opportunity to learn from the best, be involved in these big competitions, and they were the most connected team with the outside world.

"Max was already on the team and they had several others. It's kind of the most interactive from my side, I could obviously speak to Max and I knew some of the other real GT drivers that were part of it and so on. So it wasn't like I was just joining sim racers, I was joining the real racers as well. It made it the most 'at home' in some ways and I think the harmony of everything and how we've worked together has been really good."

Among Norris' greatest sim racing success with Redline prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was last July's iRacing Spa 24 Hours, where he and Verstappen overcame his simulator breaking to win the virtual endurance race alongside sim racers Max Benecke and Max Wenig.

Along with Formula E's $1 million Vegas eRace in 2017, in which Redline's Bono Huis scooped the top prize of $200,000, Duhan points to the Spa win as a pivotal moment in raising the public consciousness of sim racing.

"That really opened it up," says Duhan. "I've never seen that level of media response. In the last 10 minutes, Max's pedal fell off in real-life and then he was scrambling about how to stop the car, how to change it, how to get Lando in the car and finish the race.

"It was one of the most dramatic moments I've seen in sim racing with two of the biggest names in motorsport and two of the biggest names in sim racing. It was a really amazing crossover moment with loads of drama.

"We have our own engineers, and these guys are from professional motorsport" Dom Duhan

"The pace was good from Max and Lando - they've driven iRacing quite a bit and understand how to drive it. Benecke and Wenig are very quick and can help drag the pace out of them. We worked really hard from an engineering point of view, testing the car a lot to make sure the car was in a good way. That was the first time we saw pro racers really competing at a high level in sim racing and delivering."

Alongside its Verstappen/Norris car, Redline is fielding two cars in collaboration with World Endurance Championship outfit Jota Sport in this weekend's Virtual Le Mans race. One of the cars is comprised of current FE championship leader Antonio Felix da Costa - who also represents Jota in the real-world WEC (pictured below) - IndyCar's Felix Rosenqvist and sim racers Rudy van Buren and Kevin Siggy.

Van Buren won the World's Fastest Gamer competition in 2017 and earned a simulator role with McLaren, while Siggy won the McLaren Shadow competition last year and most recently secured a real-life FE test after he triumphed in the FE Race at Home Challenge series last weekend. The second Jota Sport car will feature WEC regulars Will Stevens and Gabriel Aubry alongside sim drivers Aleksi Uusi-Jaakkola and Dominik Farber.

Redline is more than used to preparing for virtual endurance races with the support of its own real-world motorsport engineers - including Kinds (now at MP Motorsport), who will run the Verstappen/Norris car - working in tandem with its sim-racing veteran drivers.

"The preparation process is that we have our own engineers, and these guys are from professional motorsport," explains Duhan. "They know both angles, they know how to use all the telemetry, MoTeC [data-logging software] and how a driver's mindset needs to be, how much time of practising needs to be put in and what scenarios to test. We work with the Jota engineers on the Jota cars, and with Jota's management for all of the comms and social and stuff like that.

"Preparation starts early, it's about getting baseline lap times together and having a look at what we think the scenarios will be. With endurance racing, the focus is always on getting the slowest guy to become one of the faster ones, because that's where you'll win and lose the race. That collaborative effort is one of the most critical things in endurance racing.

"The other thing is having people who understand endurance racing and how to pace it: triple stinting, double stinting and whatever, all the strategic side of it. It is a bit of an unknown.

"Even in endurance racing, you don't want to be taken out when you've got 30 LMP2s all starting into Turn 1. It's going to be crazy, so making sure you're near the front in qualifying allays fears on getting destroyed in the mid-pack, which is definitely a scenario that I think might happen."

The team's latest challenge will perhaps be its toughest yet. Fighting in a field of 30 equal prototypes over 24 hours in varying simulated weather and internet stability conditions against stars from F1 and FE, previous Le Mans winners and some of the fastest sim racers on the planet will be no easy task.

But Redline's remarkable ability to stay on top of an ever-changing sim racing landscape, which has had an influx of almost every major car manufacturer and racing team in recent years, is a testament to its capability to evolve and adapt. This makes it as close to being the favourite as any team can be for virtual motorsport's most unpredictable race.

The Virtual 24 Hours of Le Mans takes place on 13-14 June, and will be broadcast live on Motorsport.tv.