Someone finally beat the hardest racetrack ever made in Trackmania, and it only took them 220 hours to finish

It took over a month of racing and 220 hours of playtime but a Trackmania player has finally beaten the racing game's most horrendously difficult map. For those of you only now noticing that tens of thousands of Twitch viewers have been religiously watching video game Hot Wheels, let me elucidate. Deep Dip 2 is a fan-made tower of racetracks that was published as a challenge to the racing game's community last month. It is 16 floors of unfathomably difficult ramps, tunnels, ledges, pipes, and beams. A simple mistake sees drivers plummeting to the bottom, like the sad cauldron man of Getting Over It. The first three players to finish would share a prize pool of over $32,000. Over the weekend, one player has now managed it, and another has since joined him. Third place is still up for grabs but, mate, I wouldn't recommend it.

The first to finish was French player Brendan "Bren_TM2" Seve, who streamed the final run with both his microphone and camera turned off in an effort to focus more fully on the nightmarish final floors. Someone on YouTube has put together a nice compilation of highlights, starting with this hairy moment, in which the racer literally drives along a goddamn wall. The final jump is particularly frightening - a vertical hurtle toward a finish line suspended in mid-air, hanging thousands of kilometres above the starting line. Every jump in Deep Dip 2 seems to require total commitment. But the final one has special tension. After a practice approach, Seve gunned his engines and went for the last leap. He made it.

"I thought I didn't make the last jump, I thought I was lacking speed," he said, coming back on-camera (but not before leaping on his bed and unplugging his own headset in the heat of the moment). "I'm shaking like crazy. We're done."

"I'm so happy," said Seve. "I'm so relieved... The last jump, I was afraid I would go down without having enough speed. This is insane. I'm so happy... I've never been so stressed playing Trackmania ever."

The player was met with a congratulations message from the map's makers. "Congratulations, you've done it!" said the audio message. "The metaphorical Everest. You made it to the top. You were willing to fail and because of that, you have achieved something not many will accomplish. You have conquered Deep Dip 2... Now go celebrate, you've earned it."

Seve takes away half of the prize pool, over $15,000, leaving the remaining money for others to follow. The second prize has since been nabbed by Czech player Filip "eLconn21" Šprungl, whose own final run was also broadcasted on Twitch not long afterwards. He'll take home the second prize of about $9000.

While the third place is still up for grabs, according to the leaderboards, the map will soon be broken down into separate floors so that any player can try each floor for themselves.

This is the second time Seve has won such a competition, having beaten the previous Deep Dip as well. He said the feeling of beating this one was "better than the first" although he did admit it wasn't happy hiking all the time, as you might expect from a gruelling month-long challenge broadcast to thousands of people every day.

"I'm so glad I'm not on floor three right now, sweating," he said.

That difficulty and stress set in for a lot of the racers, with some wondering out loud if the course was too difficult. One of the racers, "Wirtual", gave up on the 14th floor. Which sounds like the action of a real quitter. Until you recognise this same player once completed Trackmania blindfolded. That's how hard this course was. Whether a Deep Dip 3 continues the trend some day in the long-running multiplayer racing game, we'll have to wait and see. For now, Wirtual has a thorough run-down of the month-long event that is worth a watch if you want absolutely all the ups and downs.