Second-year Formula SimRacing driver Alex Siebel took his first victory in the rFactor 2 based series in its Indianapolis round.
He beat both 2020 champion Jernej Simoncic and three-time 2021 race winner Michi Hoyer, who both joined him on the podium.
Siebel took pole position by a margin of 0.002s over Collin Spork.
Simoncic qualified in third but a good start meant he passed Spork at the first corner.
Both of the top two drivers adopted the same tyre strategy as they left their mandatory two hard tyre stints until the latter stages of the race.
A crucial factor was that Siebel always pitted for new tyres before Simoncic as the undercut proved to be very effective, with multiple position changes lower down the order being attributed to it.
Despite having tyres that were three laps younger in the final stint, Burst SimPlexity Esport driver Simoncic was unable to get ahead of Siebel and take his second win of the year.
After a comparatively poor qualifying result given his early season form, fellow Burst Esport driver Hoyer finished on the bottom step of the podium after starting from fourth and initially dropping to sixth.
Hoyer was among the first to stop during each pit window and undercut team-mate Dawid Mroczek for fifth after the first stop before jumping both Muhammed Patel and Spork in the second round of tyre changes by coming in earlier.
In that same second pit window Spork came in one lap after Hoyer but two laps after Patel, which meant he was on course to finish the race in fourth despite having both Patel and Janos Bracsok behind him on the soft tyres while he was on the hards.
However a mistaken downshift into neutral and then change back up to first gear caused Spork to spin at Turn 13 and fall to his eventual finishing position of sixth.
While only one position separated the Burst SimPlexity Esport drivers at the end of the race, second place for defending champion Simoncic compared to third for Hoyer means it was a three point swing in favour of the Slovenian.
That means Simoncic’s drivers’ championship has extended to nine points with Hoyer still his closest challenger.
With half of the season completed Burst SimPlexity Esport still leads the constructors’ championship despite a win for Evolution Motorsports’ Siebel as 63 points currently separate the two teams.
