The all-conquering Team Redline has added another title to its trophy cabinet, securing victory in the Esports Racing World Cup (ERWC).
Twenty-two teams lined up for this first season of ERWC, a unique competition running across three days using a different simulator each day in its own mini-knockout tournament. Each team fielded a three-driver squad, but only the top two in each team would count towards the race score. Drivers would take one point for a win, two for second and so on, with teams ranked from lowest score to highest, and penalty points be awarded for incidents.
Unicorns of Love set the early pace in Assetto Corsa Competizione on day one, with Tobias Gronewald winning and Michael Tauscher in third, behind George Boothby of YAS Heat. Redline would place second in that heat, with Enzo Bonito and Kevin Siggy in fourth and fifth.
Veloce’s James Baldwin won the second heat, from R8G’s Dennis Schoeninger, but it was Triton Racing who won the round through Jakub Charcot and Dominik Blajer’s fourth and fifth place finishes.
With the first races over, the top five teams in each heat advanced to the quarter finals. The remainder entered a repechage for two more spots.
Williams needed that second chance, and Nikodem Wisniewski and Martin Stefanko finished in second and fifth to secure top spot. Carbon Simsport claimed the other berth on countback through Jakub Maciejewski’s third place finish, while race-winner Tobias Pfeffer saw his Logitech G Altus team fail to qualify.
Drivers from eight different teams finished in the top eight in the quarter final. Victory went to BS+COMPETITION’s Nils Naujoks, ahead of Schoeninger and Alex Smolyar (Top Racing), but again it was Unicorns at the top of the table thanks to consistent finishing from Gronewald and Tauscher.
Naujoks won the semi-final to make it two in a row, but the team was eliminated. Veloce placed first through Baldwin’s second place and Eamonn Murphy in fifth. Unicorns just qualified for the final in second, with Redline’s Jeffrey Rietveld picking up two penalty points to knock the favourites out.
That left the final best-of-three race shootout between Veloce and Unicorns. Gronewald beat Baldwin in the first race, but two penalty points for Baldwin meant Veloce lost overall. A Veloce 1-2 followed after Tauscher unbelievably span at the final corner to hand it to Baldwin, but Tauscher made amends to win the final race with Gronewald fourth to win the day.
Day two – on rFactor 2 at Silverstone – started off worse for Unicorns, as the team failed to qualify from its heat, in a race won by Manuel Biancolilla (Ballas) but topped by Williams – once the timing screen glitches had been ironed out.
The second heat was more straightforward, with a 1-2 for R8G through Marcell Csincsik from Erhan Jajovski, with Veloce second courtesy of Baldwin in third and Isaac Gillissen in fifth.
In the repechage it was Smolyar who took the win for Top Racing, but Burst filled the rest of the podium with Jernej Simoncic and Michi Hoyer to qualify alongside Unicorns.
The top six in the quarter-final all came from different teams, with Jajovski taking the win for R8G from Biancolilla, but Redline topped the table as Siggy and Rietveld finished third and fifth. Williams, Burst, and Rocket also all qualified, but Unicorns was eliminated.
R8G and Redline then qualified for the final – amazingly with all three drivers from both teams inside the top ten – which Redline would win by two races to one. That was enough to put Redline at the top of the overall points table, ahead of R8G.
The final day saw the action move to iRacing and the Okayama circuit, and Redline wasn’t hanging about. In the first heat the team scored a 1-2-3 to qualify for the quarter final by a huge margin, while Apex Racing’s Yohann Harth and Jamie Fluke managed second and third in the second heat to top that group.
Veloce had to rely on the repechage to come through the heats, tying with Top Racing to qualify by a relatively comfortable margin. However the quarter final saw both Veloce and R8G eliminated – which was enough to crown Redline as overall champion. Not that this slowed the team down at all, as it recorded yet another 1-2-3 in the semi-final, before a comfortable 2-1 win over Apex in the three-race final.
If you’re based in the UK and want to try your hand at esports this year, qualifying for the 2022 Porsche Esports Carrera Cup GB is underway now. You’ll need an iRacing subscription to take part in both the qualifier event and the championship itself which starts in just three weeks. The fastest 26 drivers in the qualifier, using the new 911 GT3 Cup car, will take the start in the first round, at Silverstone, on 20th February.
Porsche hasn’t revealed the full calendar and schedule just yet, but it’s set to be a 16-race season, running eight rounds at UK circuits with the final rounds coming in May. The prize fund hasn’t yet been announced either, but it stood at £14,000 in 2021.
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