until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
The Red Bull Racing Esports pair of Graham Carroll and reigning Porsche Esports Supercup champion Sebastian Job won the final round of the BMW SIM 120 Cup on iRacing.
They’ll race against the other five winning pairs from the previous rounds along with the 10 victors from the BMW M2 CS Racing Cup on rFactor 2 in the BMW SIM Live final later this year.
Current Formula 1 racers Romain Grosjean and Max Verstappen were on the entry list for the race, but only Grosjean got to participate, and he was tapped into a spin by a rival.
In qualifying Job put his car on pole position at the Interlagos circuit, and he was able to build an eight-second lead over Antti Ahola for KOVA in second before the pitstops.
Just past the hour mark into the two-hour long race Scott Andrews took over from Maarten van Loozenoord in the highest-placed car of Grosjean’s R8G team, and he took first place after having a shorter pitstop by not fitting new tyres.
Carroll, with fresh tyres, easily closed down and overtook Andrews to win the race for Red Bull Esports by 12 seconds.
Pekka Tuomainen for KOVA also passed the R8G car to finish in second place but Andrews held onto third place, gaining a position on the VRS Coanda Simsport 8 car, driven by Mack Bakkum and Jeremy Bouteloup.
Haas F1 driver Grosjean completed his second stint of the season for the second of the two R8G esports cars.
Yuri Kasdorp did the first half of the race and in that time he moved up from 16th to 10th before handing the car over to Grosjean.
But not long into Grosjean’s stint he was spun around by Fabrice Cornelis of Urano Esports HP as Cornelis went for a late move up the inside of Turn 6.
Grosjean dropped to 18th position but was able to recover three of those positions by the end of the race to finish in 15th.
The Frenchman’s previous outing in the top split of the BMW SIM 120 Cup was in the third round at the Nurburgring, where he crossed the line in 17th.
Two of the Team Redline cars retired in the very early stages with Gianni Vecchio of Team Redline Blue caught up in an opening-lap pile-up at the exit of the Senna ‘S’, his car rolling over before he retired.
Team Redline Orange also retired early into the race with Maximilian Benecke sustaining a lot of damage after hitting one of the Coanda Simsport cars.
The damage for the orange car also meant that Red Bull F1 driver Verstappen, who was due to drive the second stint in that car, never took part in the race.
BMW’s SIM Live Final, which originally intended to have all the winners from BMW’s simracing competitions together in Munich for an on-site event, will now take place with all the racers competing virtually on December 5.
