Sim racing’s strongest team has just got stronger.
Luke McKeown, who announced his departure from the Apex Racing Team two weeks ago, has joined the Red Bull family. Hoping for a new challenge in his career, he’s set to compete for both Oracle Red Bull Sim Racing and Team Redline.
The 20-year-old started his tenure with the Apex Racing Team while still balancing school with sim racing, before moving full-time. But even before that, it was Altus Esports where he made his first steps.
“I just learnt how much hard work goes into everything,” he explained.
“I wasn’t really on that level, at that time I was in school and I was just hopping on and going into races without really doing any preparation”.
After a year or so, McKeown moved on to the Corby-based outfit, where he’s spent most of his young career so far.
Summing up his time there, he said that learning from ART helped him to reach his peak, before revising that comment: “Maybe not my peak, maybe that’s still coming up, but it’s where I got to be my best so far.”
And that comment very much lines up with his results, too. Even despite sixth and fourth place finishes in the last two years of the iRacing Porsche Tag Heuer Esports Supercup, he said there were moments in those seasons which leave room for improvement, and maybe the Red Bull and Redline groups can help.
Perhaps something that McKeown didn’t contend with as much at Apex as he will at his new team, though, is competition from within his own team. He was one of only two Apex Racing Team family drivers in the top ten of PESC last season, whereas there were five Redline/Red Bull family drivers.
How he deals with this new aspect remains to be seen, but for now, he seems pleased to move on to a new chapter in his career: “I always like a challenge, and my motivation is to win races and championships, and I thought I could do that better somewhere else.”
That’s despite some great memories at his former squad.
“My proudest moment is probably what I managed to achieve in the F4 car. In the British F4 championship 2023, I came back from having negative points after the first round to win, and also to win the inaugural FIA F4 title. They were my best moments.”
Unsurprisingly, the F4 car features in his plans for competition throughout 2025. Earlier this month, iRacing announced that a four-event, eight-race FIA F4 Global Esports Championsip presented by Moza would be returning in October, after a “successful inaugural season in 2024”.
Qualifying for the 2025 campaign begins in mid-June with the start of iRacing’s third season this year, with the top ten in each of the Regional Tour series being invited to the championship. McKeown vowed to be one of the ten from Europe.
Alongside the iRacing special events, which really ramp up in frequency over the summer, starting with the Nürburgring 24 Hours next weekend, McKeown also expressed a desire to be a part of the IndyCar Buttkicker iRacing Pro Series should it return in 2025.
Nothing has been announced yet, but the Brit would surely return to the series that he finished fifth in last year.
For now, it’s about getting acclimatised to a new team environment for the first time since becoming full-time.
On his first impressions of the team, he said: “So far it’s been really good, really eye-opening, I think to what top professionalism is like”. He stopped short of setting out any specific targets, other than striving to perform as well as possible with his new team.
And the Redline/Red Bull family are continuing to make moves with other personnel, not just drivers. Engineer Lucas Bloom left McLaren Shadow after two years in March 2025 and has now been picked up by Redline.
He engineered two seasons of the F1 Sim Racing World Championship, where McLaren Shadow finished sixth and seventh in the teams’ championships, respectively. The best Drivers’ championship result was also sixth for Alfie Butcher earlier this year.
And it’s all change for McLaren Shadow, as former F1 Champion Lucas Blakeley has departed the team this week, but for the Redline/Red Bull family, Bloom is another great addition to the team. It shows how sim racing’s strongest teams are not resting on their laurels, and are still striving to improve.
We’ll see throughout the rest of 2025 just how McKeown and Bloom can add to that outfit.
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