The third race meeting of TCR Scandinavia took place at Solvalla, where Johan Kristoffersson claimed two more victories, extending his winning streak to five consecutive races. However, Robert Dahlgren won the third race and thus maintained the leadership in the championship with margins of 19 and 26 points ahead of Kristoffersson and Fredrik Ekblom respectively.
On the grid for the first race, the poleman Kristoffersson was demoted to fourth for a yellow flag infringement in Qualifying. Haglöf and Ekblom shared the front row.
Kristoffersson took a perfect start and managed to squeeze in second position between Haglöf and Ekblom who, then were both imposed a stop-and-go penalty for jump start.
Haglöf observed the penalty on lap 7, while he was still leading and Ekblom did it on lap 12 when he was in third position behind Dahlgren.
Kristoffersson claimed his fourth consecutive race victory ahead of Dahlgren, while Andersson was able to finish third after a close fight with Blomstedt and Strandberg who followed him in fourth and fifth. Haglöf and Ekblom were classified 7th and 11th respectively.
Kristofferson repeated his win in the second race. Despite being beaten to the first corner by Robert Dahlgren, Kristofferson retook the lead after slight contact between the pair on lap 2 and then held off Dahlgren for the remainder of the race. Ekblom finished third, Blomstedt was fourth and Strandberg fifth.
Haglöf made contact with Mattias Andersson on lap 9 while the pair were fighting for 3rd place and had a stop-go penalty imposed for the incident, which meant Haglöf eventually finished 10th. Andersson had to pit for a new tyre and so he finished 16th.
Two laps from the end, the Volkswagen of Andreas Ahlberg spun while defending 9th place from Reuben Kressner and the yellow flags came out as Ahlberg’s car was stranded on the circuit. Kressner therefore claimed 9th position, finishing behind the Audi of Mikaela Åhlin-Kottulinsky, who scored her first STCC points by finishing 8th.
Kristofferson’s winning streak ended in Heat 3, however, after another poor start from the dirtier side of the track again allowed Dahlgren to lead the pole-sitter going into Turn 1. Unlike in Heat 2, this time Dahlgren was able to defend the lead throughout the race and so took a lights-to-flag victory by just six-tenths of a second. Behind the pair, Ekblom repeated his result from the second race to claim his second podium finish of the day.
The Safety Car made two appearances during the race, once when Albin Wärnelöv’s VW stopped at the exit of Turn 3 and again when Lappalainen made contact with Blomstedt. Mattias Andersson had made another good start and was in a comfortable third place for much of the race, but ran wide just after the second restart and so allowed Ekblom to take the podium place.
Strandberg finished fourth ahead of Haglöf, Ahlberg and Brink, while Kressner finished tenth and so denied Åhlin-Kottulinsky another points finish.
The next event of the STCC TCR Scandinavia will take place at Falkenberg, Sweden, on July 8.
