Pagenaud a winner from South Boston to Spa
May 10th, 2010 by DavidP
Simon Pagenaud completed a unique double yesterday, becoming the first driver to ever win a Legends Cup race at South Boston Speedway and the Le Mans Series Spa 1000kms in the same season. Pagenaud, an iRacer since last August, scored his Legends Cup sim racing win at South Boston in February. Yesterday, he teamed with Sebastian Bourdais and Pedro Lamy to drive a Peugeot 908 HDi FAP to victory in a chaotic Spa 1000kms that featured a race stoppage due to a power outage throughout the Ardennes region of Belgium. In the end, however, the Pagenaud/Bourdais/Lamy Peugeot came home more than a minute ahead of its sister car driven by Franck Montagny, Stefan Sarrazin and Nicolas Minassian.
Elsewhere, NASCAR’s iRacers suffered a disappointing weekend at Darlington Speedway where Brad Keselowski topped the iRacing contingent in both the Sprint Cup Series’ Southern 500 (twelfth place) and the Royal Purple 200 Nationwide Series race (seventh place). However, Keselowski continues to lead the NASCAR Nationwide Series points race while Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Martin Truex, Jr. (18th and 19th in the Southern 500, respectively) are 12th and 13th in the Sprint Cup standings.
iRacers didn’t win, but they sure figured prominently in Round Three of the 2010 VW Jetta TDI Cup at New Jersey Motorsports Park where half the 26 car starting field consisted of iRacing members, including Wyatt Gooden, who qualified second fastest. The race itself saw no less than seven iRacers in the top ten including Arie Ouimet (second), A.J. Nealey (fifth), Gooden (sixth), J.D. Mobley (seventh), Jake Thompson (eighth), J.J. Tomlinson (ninth) and Andrew Cordeiro (tenth).