On February 4th, James Baldwin was announced as a simulator driver for the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team. That means he now drives virtual versions of the team's F1 car on circuits that feature in this year's World Championship, feeding setup data back to the engineers so the real drivers have a baseline when they arrive for practice.
It is quiet, detail-oriented work. Not the kind that makes highlight reels. But it puts Baldwin inside one of the biggest teams in Formula 1, doing a job that directly shapes how their car performs on a race weekend.
A few weeks earlier, in January, he signed with Team Redline for the 2026 sim racing season. For anyone outside the sim racing world, Team Redline is the team Max Verstappen has raced for since 2015. Over 25 years old, and consistently one of the strongest rosters in the discipline.
Baldwin is their fifth British driver, alongside Sebastian Job, Chris Lulham, and Luke McKeown. Lulham now also races real cars in the GT World Challenge Europe through Verstappen.com Racing. The line between Redline as a sim team and Redline as a motorsport operation is blurring fast.
Two major signings in six weeks. Not bad for someone who nearly left racing altogether a decade ago.
How he got here
Baldwin started in karting as a kid and won five national championships. Then the money ran out before he could progress into cars. He was 17.
He turned to sim racing instead. By 2019, he had won the World's Fastest Gamer competition, earning a $1 million scholarship and a real-world drive with Jenson Button's team in the British GT Championship. He won on debut at Oulton Park and finished the season with four poles and three podiums.
Then the funding dried up again. Baldwin went back to esports, won more titles, and was named Autosport's Esports Driver of the Year.
By late 2022, he had sponsors lined up for a full GTWCE season with Garage 59. As Traxion reported at the time, every one of them fell through when the money was actually needed. A backup drive at Spa collapsed too, after a driver grading change meant the team needed a gold-rated driver. Baldwin was rated silver.
He launched a crowdfunding campaign. His YouTube audience had suggested it. The speed was never the problem. The funding always was.
Garage 59 kept calling him back anyway. Spa twice, GTWCE Endurance Cup podiums, strong Silver Cup results through 2024 and 2025. Every time he got in the car, he was quick. The opportunities just came in pieces rather than seasons.
That is what makes the 2026 signings feel different. For the first time, things are coming to him.
But Baldwin has also built something beyond race results. His YouTube channel has over 180,000 subscribers, he runs a coaching business for sim racers, and he is one of the more active competitors in Le Mans Ultimate's growing endurance scene, where events are now pulling thousands of teams onto grids at La Sarthe and Spa.
His stated ambition is to become the first gamer to win the real 24 Hours of Le Mans. Given the trajectory, I would not rule it out.
With the growth of sim racing, do you think Baldwin would prefer to do full time sim racing or real racing? Maybe real racing, by a slight margin?
