Hypercar S2 R5 Review

Heading into the penultimate race of the season, Pagani Corse with a lead of 47 points just had to finish the race to secure WCC for the running season. Hopes were low for other teams who needed a miracle for a turn of events in their favor. The track itself however was slightly in favor of the Gordon Murray T50. This time, 4 of 5 teams showed up, unfortunately all of Mazda Racing's drivers were unable to join.

Sprint

A 15 lap sprint was to decide the starting grid for R5. When sprint was go, Blaze in the GMA had a good start and was quite a distance ahead of everyone else heading into T1, Sot in the Pagani and Egg in the Aston Martin had an even start as a result they were neck and neck going into the first few corners, the DeTomaso driven by Streekh had a relatively poor start. Going into lap 2, Blaze was in the lead followed by Sot ahead of Egg ahead of Streekh. Sot was closing in on Blaze, and soon passed him, a lap or 2 later Blaze and Egg had made mistakes and fell back by quite a bit of time. The AMR was now battling the DeTomaso for P3 while the GMA was quite safe in P2, the Zonda not having made any early mistakes was quite a distance ahead. Few more laps in and more mistakes came by for everyone, by lap 14 however the Zonda have made the least amount of mistakes was a long way ahead of GMA in P2 and Egg in the Valkyrie had dropped all the way down to P4. The gap between P2 and P4 however was just under 4s. On the 15th lap, Egg gave it everything and right at the final corner, passed both the GMA and the DeTomaso having gotten a better exit. This secured Valk a P2 in the sprint. GMA finished P3 followed by DeTomaso, AMR passing them on the last corner took them both by surprise, however everyone was unsurprised to find out that Sot in the Pagani won the sprint.

Race

When race was green, Blaze in the GMA got a lightning start, going from P3 to P1 before he made it to T1. Egg in the Valkyrie had a decent start and so did Lexi in the Zonda. Streekh in the P72 however had a poor start. This time around. Zonda's usual duo wasn't racing, Lexi and Obli were. This gave people on the grid some hope as they didn't expect either of them to perform as good.

Meanwhile, Blaze and Streekh, drivers for GMA and DeTomaso respectively, were both going solo due to their teammates being unavailable. Back to the race, by lap 2 Pagani was challenging GMA for the lead, the battle went on into lap 3 though Pagani had managed to pass GMA. A few minutes in and Blaze made a mistake dropping him all the way down to P4.

He fought his way up and about 9 minutes in he was right on the tail of the AMR in P2, 2 minutes later Blaze snatched away P2 from Egg.

Positions and gaps were more or less same from there on until 20 mins in when both GMA and DeTomaso boxed for their first round of pit stop. Interestingly, GMA went from battling for P2 to P4, before pit stops DeTomaso in P4 was around 10 seconds behind the GMA. This was a morale boost for Streekh in the DeTomaso but not for Blaze. Blaze had fought his way back up once, he could surely do it again. And so he tried, by the time we were at the 30 mins mark, GMA was ahead of DeTomaso.

After that the positions hardly changed, at 45 mins, both Zonda and Valk pit for driver swaps. Avith got behind the wheel of the Valkyrie while Obli behind that of the Zonda. At around 50 minutes into the race, DeTomaso came in for their final pit stop. 6 minutes later Obli lapped Avith in P2.

The positions remained same from there on with DeTomaso occasionally getting lapped, Avith pit 78 mins into the race and Egg was back driving the Valkyrie again.

In the end Zonda cruised to a win leading by over a lap and a half, both Obli and Lexi had exceeded people's expectations.

Zonda winning this race handed them their 2nd WCC, the battle for WDC is still on as P1 is tied between the Pagani drivers Sot and Agg (105 pts) and in P3 is the AMR main, Egg who is less than 25 points behind both drivers which gives him a chance to win the WDC provided that the Zonda drivers don't start/finish the season finale, hang around to see who wins!