It only took a few laps for regular season champion and points leader Brandon Hawkin’s race to go from good to bad. Qualifying in P2, he almost immediately slipped to P3 at the start as Saxon pushed DelCampo towards T1. Then on lap 2, an overly ambitious dive by P7 clipped Hawkin’s rear bumper, sending him back to P14. Hawkins would eventually finish P9, netting him only 12 points and dropping him to 3rd in the Championship.
Pole-sitter, Nick DelCampo skillfully held off the hard charging Ryan Maloney and Nathan Saxon for the remaining 5 laps, resulting in a tie for the top spot on the leaderboard between Saxon and DelCampo with 56 points each.
With Hawkins seemingly out of the picture, Saxon and DelCampo held off an early charge from Ryan Maloney then put on a master-class of car control and sportsmanship for the remainder of this season’s final race – it was generally agreed that the last few laps were probably the most exciting racing of the 2021 season.
The two drivers tied for the championship were actively dicing and swapping positions almost immediately after taking the green flag for race 2, all the while managing the cars behind and more importantly, managing the incident and track-limit penalties imposed by iRacing (the series has a maximum of 15 ‘incidents’ before a Drive Through Penalty). When the dust cleared, it was Nick DelCampo with his second win of the night, and a narrow 1-point lead over Nathan Saxon in the championship.
Nick was extremely pleased with his performance this season and is excited for the opportunity to get into a real Spec MX-5 race car! His options are an HPDE event courtesy of Spec MX-5 Challenge and Winding Road Racing, or possibly get started on his competition license at LevelUp Racing School’s 2-day racing school program in one of their Spec MX-5 race cars.
For his 2nd place effort, Nathan Saxon receives a complimentary HPDE/Track Day pass from the Sports Car Drivers Association for any one of their events in 2021.
In additional Penguin r/c Simulation is issuing almost $800 in store credits to the top-6 regular season drivers and the top-3 from last night. Finally, Greg Profeta was chosen as the 2021 Regular Season Most Improved Rookie and will get a share of the Penguin r/c Simulation cash.
It’s been another fantastic season and a huge thanks to everyone behind the scenes as well as to all the driver’s who committed their time and energy into running the 5 month long series.