Nelson Piquet Jr. knew today that he had a great opportunity to win the 2022 Lamborghini Grand Finals title, and win it he did. ANSA Motorsports’ Brazilian driver dominated race 2 from lights to flag to take the PRO title, the most prestigious of the four up for grabs.
Starting from pole, Piquet was easily able to administer his first place in the first half of the race, keeping a gap on Patrick Kujala (US RaceTronics). It looked to be all plain sailing, because Max Weering, paired with Loris Spinelli who yesterday won race 1, was unable to get any higher than 12th place after qualifying 14th on Saturday.
After 20 minutes the window was opened to allow the drivers to make their mandatory pit stop. Weering came in immediately to leave as many free laps as possible available for Spinelli to try and make a desperate comeback against the Brazilian.
Once all the pit stops had cycled through, Piquet was back in front ahead of Danny Formal (Wayne Taylor Racing) and Marzio Moretti (Target Racing). The Italian lost out in the fight for first place, while Formal made a great recovery that took him to within half a second’s striking distance of Piquet in the final two laps.
Piquet responded immediately and put the hammers down to take the flag well over a second ahead of his rivals, but at the same time he had to keep one eye on where Loris Spinelli finished, to make sure of the 2022 title.
The Italian made a superb recovery from the mid-field, moving up from ninth to fourth overall with a series of fastest laps. It wasn’t enough to worry Piquet however and he had to settle for that position, helped by a 5” penalty for Patrick Kujala for exceeding track limits. The performance gap between Weering and Piquet was just too much and this made all the difference in the aggregate standings of race 1 and 2.
Third place went to Moretti, while in sixth Billy Johnson took advantage of a 10" penalty rightly inflicted on the Iron Dame Doriane Pin and Giano Taurino. Both picked up 5” for track limits and another 5” for causing a collision.
Race 2 this afternoon also assigned another title, that of the PRO-AM category. The outcome was shrouded in uncertainty until right after the flag due to the results of the two winners of yesterday’s and today’s races. John Dubets and Lew Bryson (PPM - Precision Performance Motorsport) triumphed in race 2, while yesterday they were seventh.
Yesterday however the win went to Bryan Ortiz and Sebastian Carazo, their teammates. Today the Puerto Ricans picked up a seventh place, thus replicating the same results as their rivals. As a result, the fastest lap then came into play – as per the regulations – and the title win thus went to Ortiz/Carazo.
