Devin Braune is the dominating driver of the RCCO World eX Championship. ABT Sportsline’s lifestyle magazine ‘uptrend’ featured him in a profile.
Devin Braune cannot say exactly when motorsport first took hold of him. “I must have been three or four years old.” Around the year 2000, Formula 1 appeared on television at home for the first time. Shortly afterwards, he was sitting in front of the PlayStation, determined to drive himself. His hero then, as now: Michael Schumacher.
Braune started out in rental karts and quickly caused a stir. Track operators repeatedly switched off the youngster’s engine for safety reasons, worried that he was going too fast. “But I wasn’t too fast. I had the thing completely under control,” recalls the now 29-year-old.
At six, Braune competed in kart slalom events in schoolyards. At eight, he was allowed to enter tournaments for the first time – and immediately won his debut race. A year later, he competed in the German Championship. Through the AMC Waltrop and MSC Herten clubs, he moved on to circuit racing, progressing from the ADAC Kart Youngster Cup to World Formula.
But karting is expensive. “Tyres cost money, fuel costs money, travelling costs money. And we simply didn’t have it,” Braune says. At the age of 11 or 12, he had to give up his kart. Even low-cost opportunities were beyond the family’s means. His physique also became a factor: now standing 1.96 metres tall, he soon grew too tall and too heavy for karting. “When you weigh 20 kilograms more than the other kids, you cannot expect much.”
In 2008, he contested his final German Championship. This is where the second part of his story begins. Alongside karting, Braune had discovered sim racing – although it was not called that at the time. Suddenly, money, equipment and body weight no longer mattered. “That was the great equaliser. I was immediately back at the front.”
The spark for virtual motorsport came from a stand at the Essen Motor Show, where he drove the rFactor 1 simulation for the first time. “It felt almost exactly like karting; everything was very intuitive for me,” he remembers. Through modding – the modification of game content – he discovered programming, chose computer science at school and eventually studied game development.
An internship brought the aspiring game developer to Studio 397, the studio behind racing simulations, and he never left. Today, Braune works there full-time and entirely remotely, currently focusing primarily on the successful Le Mans Ultimate simulation.
The fact that his two worlds – racing driver and developer – came together was almost a coincidence. “I was the only person in the studio who could drive a car quickly.” When Studio 397 helped develop the eX ZERO, Braune was invited to test the virtual circuit, racing with the World eX team in the evenings and giving feedback. Later, he became part of the championship himself. With more than 50 victories and three World Championship titles, he is by far its most successful driver – and almost unbeatable.
Braune has stepped away from professional sim racing in other series, however. “It is no longer fun for me,” he says plainly. “The winner is the person who can invest the most time.” Eighty-hour weeks for one hundredth of a second? Not for him. Above all, he is frustrated by the lack of respect on virtual tracks. The bigger and more anonymous communities become, the more careless the driving gets: “People simply do not care whether they put someone into the wall, because there are no consequences.”
That is precisely what makes World eX unique in his view. In principle, anyone who receives an invitation can take part. But the sense of community is consistently enforced. Mistakes are explained, while those who repeatedly behave badly are removed. The reward is fair racing: “Respectful, truly fantastic wheel-to-wheel battles, where we sometimes drive side by side for half a lap – you cannot get that anywhere else,” Braune says.
Would he recommend World eX to others? “Yes, absolutely. There is currently nothing comparable in sim racing.” His partner Jenny has now joined the grid, too.
