Eversley is the champion as drama hits Lewis
Ryan Eversley was crowned the first ever TCR champion in North America as he won the Pirelli World Challenge title at Watkins Glen. The RealTime Racing’s driver ended the season with another victory, the second for him in the weekend and the fifth in the season.
However, the expected shootout between his Honda Civic and the Brian Herta Autosport’s Hyundai i30 N of Michael Lewis never happened.
In fact, after taking the lead at the start from the pole position, Lewis was forced to pit at the end of the first lap with an engine bug. His misfortune was somehow limited by an incident between two competitors of the TCA class that prompted the safety car into action. The technical issue fixed, Lewis rejoined in the same lap of the leaders, but with the whole field in front of him.
Eversely was leading from his teammate Mason Filippi who had passed Lewis’ colleague Mark Wilinkis for second on lap 5.
Lewis began to recover and jumped all the TCA competitors in one lap, then moved up to 11th on lap 6, 10th on lap 8, remained stuck behind Nate Vincent until he managed to overtake him on lap 13.
Soon afterwards, the safety car was deployed again after Dwight Merriman’s Volkswagen Golf had crashed into the barriers and, at the same time, Wilkins’ speed faded and he pitted lamenting a loss of power; he rejoined but at a crawling pace.
The race resumed for two final laps; Eversley and Filippi finished 1-2 for RealTime Racing, local driver JT Coupal completed the podium in the Compass Racing Audi RS3 LMS, beating by a narrow margin the other Audi cars of Anthony Geraci and Jérimy Daniel and Lewis in sixth position. After the race, Geraci was given a 37-second time penalty for jump-start and dropped to 10th.
Eversley topped the final standings with 276 points, Lewis and Wilkins were classified second and third with 259 and 229 points respectively.
