Robin Larsson completed the perfect weekend after winning the action-packed final after the season-opening event at Lydden Hill.
Larsson took home the gold after running a clean and safe race away from the carnage of lap 1 in the final. His teammate, Andreas Bakkerud, scored a nice second-place finish behind him to lock in RX Cartel’s first 1-2 finish of the season gaining vital points for the team championship.
Further back Niclas Gronholm rounded out the podium finishing third after showing up to the event with no testing and having never driven an electric vehicle before. Gronholm proved his skills as he sat in for Kevin Eriksson who sustained a foot injury taking him out of competition. The Finnish driver garnered some hefty points for team OMSE and may see a return later in the season.
An unfortunate end to the weekend for world rally driver Kris Meeke as he was taken out of the competition on lap 1 of the final when Travis Pastrana failed to make a pass and re-entered the track causing a massive collision with Ole Christian Veiby, Fraser McConnell, and Meeke. Meeke and Pastrana were forced to retire while Veiby and McConnell continued on. McConnell would drive with a broken left rear wheel but persevered and brought home a respectable fourth-place finish.
Following McConnell and Veiby was OMSE driver Oliver Eriksson who was also caught up in the incident but only slowed him down with no damage. Eriksson would suffer lost time from the incident but never catch up to the pack to recover what time had been lost.
In Supercars, Fraser McConnell was able to top Yury Belevskiy in the final after battling each other all weekend. British rallycross driver Patrick O’Donovan was able to join the two on the podium with a third-place finish.
NRX NEXT featured a carnage-filled final with broken track barriers, blind drivers, and badly-damaged cars but Simon Olofsson made the ultimate comeback of the weekend to win the race after toppling his car in Saturday’s race. Top contenders George Megennis and Casper Jansson battled hard all weekend but it finally came to a head when the drivers reached the final and had an incident going into the jump which resulted in damage to both cars who tried to continue on but ultimately the session was red-flagged. Lane Vacala was also involved in an on-track incident after driving through the joker barriers due to his hood covering his windshield. Vacala wouldn’t be allowed to restart when the session was reset. Olofsson raced to victory when the session resumed followed by Tommi Hallman and Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky.
Down in the smallest class of Crosscars, the family of Enholms took the top spots as Sebastian Enholm finished first and his sister Fida finished second. Jimmie Osterberg would round out the podium in third.
