Bucheim on Top of Radical Challenge

Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca saw close racing among the Radical contingent.

Tino Bucheim scorched to the top of the iRacing.com Radical Challenge championship standings after a scorching week at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. The DE-AT-CH sim-racer scored an emphatic 211 points to sit atop the tables by 14 points in a week that saw 259 drivers cross the start line.

Pj Stergios was the top overall scorer for the week, after a dreadful first week at Mosport, the New Englander moved inside the top 10 with his impressive 223 point score on the virtual Monterey Peninsula.

This early in the season places will be very fluid but other drivers to make impressive gains during this second week include Juergon Voss whose 152 point haul took him to 14th overall and Ralf Gilles3 who moved into 27th up from 60th.

By the end of the week the top of the table saw Bucheim clear of Xavier Busoms who maintained his second place overall. Tom Lampheer’s strong week moved him to third with Lambert Brink in fourth and McCracken dropping to P5.

This week’s random race happened to be another Sunday event, namely the 7:45 second split race.

Unlike last week this race split and the feature is the lower (1596 SOF) race. Lining-up on pole was Joerg Mani, with Luuk Kikkert alongside ahead of Ralf Deininger and Michael Gene Nelson.

The author proves The Corkscrew is not the only tricky segment of pavement at Laguna.

Lap One was a substantial improvement on last week’s exercise in chaos theory. However Katier Scott was forced wide in Turn Three and tumbled down the order, while Lucas Moreira span on his own a corner later and made heavy contact with the barriers.

Mani stormed into a lead he would retain to the end, while two incidents for Deininger dropped him out of contention and by Lap Four the podium was set with Kikkert in second and Allessandro Kusmic in third.

Further back, however, drivers were embroiled in battles and while – as always – this tricky racetrack saw its share of mistakes, several drivers were making steady progress.

16th on the grid, William D Marsh, was 11th at the end of the first lap and a strong drive from the Californian brought an excellent fourth place finish. Mick Carr had a strong start — moving up to P4 from 10th on the grid — but a couple of mistakes saw him slip back to sixth ahead of Scott who recovered from her first lap incident to climb from P14 take seventh.

Overall the racing was as tight and excellent as ever, proving that clean racing exists in this series no matter what the split.

Another new feature this season is the fact that Inside SimRacing TV‘s Darin Gangi has chosen to cover this series after falling in love with the car.

The series now moves to Interlagos in Brazil for more intense racing around a classic racetrack

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