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iPSRR: Round-up after round 4

05-07-2010 - With four rounds of the iRacing Pro Series Road Racing series (iPSRR) now complete, Luca Masier heads the standings by a mere 37 points following the online racing championship's visit to the UK's Brands Hatch GP circuit. In a week that saw only three of the four sim races run as official points scoring events, the Italian claimed 275 points in his only outing of the week.

By Chris Hall, via inRacing News

Lucas Masier: "A good race for me. I tried to set a pace that allowed me to not wear out the tires after few laps, but my race set-up wasn't well balanced," explained Masier. "Except for this, in the whole race I only had a problem with traffic in the last laps when Nicolas [Faure] hit Craig [Byerley] in the back, just in front of me. Luckily I had a safe distance that allowed me to avoid them."

Occupying second in the championship standings, Klaus Kivekäs also received 275 points from his lone event of Week Four, following a pole-to-flag win. "Woohoo, second win of the season for me," the delighted Scandinavian told inRacing News. "My pace was great throughout the entire race and tire wear was phenomenally good. It wasn't the most eventful race but, still, it feels great to be back on the top podium after two unsuccessful race weeks and to have a properly competitive pace."

Sharing second in the championship with the Scandinavian on 1030 points, former series leader Jeffrey Rietveld finished 20 seconds behind Kivekäs, dropping valuable points in the process. "I've been struggling for the whole week to get the car right for race day," confessed Rietveld. "After three laps I lost the contact with Klaus and my car felt awful. It was over-steering in every corner. I decided to pit early so that I may could have a run on Klaus in the following laps. I think that I can be pretty happy with this result because this is one of my worst tracks in iRacing."

Currently fourth in the iPSRR series with 1013 points, Scandinavia's Jesse Nieminen put in the best performance of the week, earning 280 marks from his lone race at the former Formula One circuit. "I didn't imagine that I would have three wins from four races at this stage of the season before all this started," shared Nieminen this week. "The car felt awesome in the opening laps and I could open up a nice gap to Vince Staal during the first stint. On the pit stops I missed a couple of heartbeats as I braked too early for my pit box and took awhile to notice the 'Too far back' note. So I lost some time there, but luckily I had a big enough gap so that I could still come out of the stops with a seven second advantage."

Just 20 points behind Nieminen and fifth in the standings table, Matthias Egger took a podium second place finish in his 45 lap race, to keep him in contention for the championship battle. "That was a very very hard race," said the Italian. "In that one race I had more incident points than I usually make in a whole season. I overtake Joao Vaz with a good start. Then I follow Vincent Staal and I try with every move to overtake him, but nothing goes well; we had fantastic the battle in the Dingle Dell when he defend in a brilliant way and I had to go on the grass because there was not enough space. I see that I was losing too much time behind him, I decide to anticipate the pit stop and this move was good, because I took the second position with two seconds advantage."

Sitting 55 marks behind Egger after four weeks of racing, Martin Macjon took a third place finish to put the DE-AT-CH club member sixth in the iPSRR Championship fight. Taking 248 points with a podium finish in his second race of the week, Bryan Heitkotter moves up to seventh in the standings, nine marks behind Macjon. Finishing week four with the eleventh highest score of the week (222), Michael Hohenauer holds a seven point advantage over fellow DE-AT-CH club-mate Maximilian Vietmeier, who is ninth in the championship and has Iberia's Vaz closing in, a mere seven marks behind.

Round Five of the iRacing Pro Series Road Racing Championship heads to Canada for a visit to Mosport International with title fight wide open and Masier looking to maintain his newly acquired status of title favourite.