Images via Justin Melillo

American racer Zac Campbell became the third different feature winner in three events to kick off the 2022 Porsche TAG Heuer Esports Supercup season on Saturday, holding off former teammate and defending track winner Kevin Ellis Jr. in a charge to the finish at Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace, better known as Interlagos. After an intense battle for the top spot in the closing stages of the feature, Campbell followed Ellis past Dayne Warren with just a handful of laps to go before finally making his move for the win on the final lap.

Interlagos was chosen to host the third round of the 2022 season after defeating three other tracks in a fan vote that ran through the opening two rounds of the season. Host of last year’s opener, the Brazilian track is popular the world over for its many elevation changes and mix of lengthy straightaways and tight corners, each of which can push drivers to their limit.

Red Bull Racing Esports’ Sebastian Job, the 2020 series champion, was the top qualifier, and led a train of a handful of drivers throughout the sprint race. While Apex Racing Team’s Jamie Fluke finished just .062 seconds back in second, and the entire top five was separated by under a second, Job led all 10 laps of the sprint race, scoring maximum points but dropping to eighth on the grid with the invert for the feature.

Barcelona sprint winner and incoming points leader Diogo Pinto of Team Redline would take over the pole for the 20 lap main event, leading the first five laps before Ellis finally pushed his Apex Racing Team entry ahead. Coanda Simsport’s Dayne Warren would get around Ellis on lap 13 and lead four laps of his own before Ellis, Campbell, and Pinto would get back around him; Warren would later need to pit and ended up an unrepresentative 19th place in the final results. But Campbell, once Ellis’ Apex teammate and now Warren’s teammate at Coanda, would stalk the lead in the closing laps before making a calculated move for the win, leading just one lap all day long—the most important one.

Pinto would maintain a four-point lead on Jeremy Bouteloup, who finished sixth in the feature, while Hockenheim winner Ayhancan Guven sits third thanks to a top-five result of his own. The top five in the standings head into back-to-back weekends at Silverstone and Red Bull Ring later this month split by just 20 points.

Porsche TAG Heuer Esports Supercup feature results from Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace were as follows:

Fin.

St.

No.

Driver

Laps

Interval

Led

Best

Pts.

1 5 15 Zac Campbell 20 1 1:34.000 72
2 2 98 Kevin Ellis Jr 20 -0.081 10 1:34.183 59
3 1 44 Diogo C. Pinto 20 -0.246 5 1:34.150 53
4 6 4 Salva Talens 20 -0.639 0 1:34.168 63
5 3 53 Ayhancan Guven 20 -1.461 0 1:34.024 49
6 9 77 Jeremy Bouteloup 20 -3.807 0 1:33.908 43
7 8 22 Sebastian Job 20 -4.326 0 1:34.078 63
8 7 49 Jamie Fluke 20 -4.743 0 1:33.988 56
9 11 37 Cooper Webster 20 -5.207 0 1:34.052 34
10 15 50 Peter Berryman 20 -6.466 0 1:33.851 28
11 25 90 Yohann Harth 20 -7.307 0 1:34.101 20
12 16 69 Moreno Sirica 20 -7.525 0 1:34.209 23
13 17 31 David Williams 20 -9.503 0 1:34.188 20
14 32 70 Gianni Vecchio 20 -10.426 0 1:34.817 14
15 10 93 Charlie Collins 20 -10.796 0 1:33.914 23
16 21 97 Tuomas Tähtelä 20 -10.862 0 1:34.596 10
17 31 79 Oskar Biksrud 20 -10.878 0 1:34.639 9
18 18 83 Bobby Zalenski 20 -11.505 0 1:34.535 11
19 4 57 Dayne Warren 20 -13.824 4 1:33.983 25
20 27 11 Maximilian Benecke 20 -14.064 0 1:34.247 6
21 28 10 Jack Sedgwick 20 -14.100 0 1:34.999 5
22 34 95 Kamil Grabowski 20 -15.212 0 1:35.359 4
23 29 51 Josh Thompson 20 -15.991 0 1:34.466 3
24 35 43 Brian Lockwood 20 -16.124 0 1:34.733 2
25 22 17 Matti Sipilä 20 -17.675 0 1:34.095 1
26 33 16 Alexander Wolters 20 -19.708 0 1:34.765 0
27 30 78 Alessandro Bico 20 -26.031 0 1:34.854 0
28 23 21 Graham Carroll 20 -40.706 0 1:34.260 0
29 12 7 Jeff Giassi 20 -43.213 0 1:34.118 9
30 14 13 Dino Lombardi 20 -45.393 0 1:34.152 7
31 20 81 Quentiin Vialatte 20 -45.824 0 1:34.281 1
32 19 40 Julien Soenen 20 -50.801 0 1:34.141 2
33 13 47 Alejandro Sánchez 10 -10 L 0 1:34.080 8
34 24 28 Sam Kuitert 10 -10 L 0 1:34.543 0
35 26 12 Jordan Caruso 5 -15 L 0 1:35.015 0

 

Porsche TAG Heuer Esports Supercup points after three rounds are as follows:

  1. Diogo Pinto, 155
  2. Jeremy Bouteloup, 151
  3. Ayhancan Guven, 148
  4. Zac Campbell, 138
  5. Jamie Fluke, 135
  6. Kevin Ellis Jr., 130
  7. Cooper Webster, 120
  8. Sebastian Job, 101
  9. Maximilian Benecke, 78
  10. Dayne Warren, 78

The 2022 Porsche TAG Heuer Esports Supercup season continues on March 19 at Silverstone Circuit, where Job led seven laps on the way to his second of three feature victories last year. As always, the action kicks off at 12:30PM ET with All-Star competition, before the Supercup goes green at 2PM ET, and all the action streams live at twitch.tv/Porsche. For more information on iRacing and for special offers, visit www.iracing.com.

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