It’s playoffs time in the V10 R-League! That means any slight mistake could see a team eliminated from the running.
With a £120,000 prize fund on the line, every team is desperate to make it to the next round.
With both the quarter-finals and semi-finals taking place this week, there was a lot of determined drivers pushing the limits.
The result was some action-packed racing. These are the best moments of the week, presented by Thrustmaster.
Thome makes the undercut work
In their quarter-final race, YAS Heat was up against the dominant force of BMW.
The Germans started with Kevin Siggy and their star man immediately jumped into the lead off the line and completed the joker lap in rapid fashion. Swapping in after the first lap for YAS Heat was Cedric Thome, who knew he had a mountain to climb. That didn’t phase him though, as Thome flew through the sweeping curves of Silverstone.
Thome took the joker and by the time Michael Romanidis swapped in for Siggy and exited the pitlane, Thome was right next to him, and able to carry his momentum into The Loop and take the lead.
Baldwin cracks
McLaren won Group B and got a ticket straight to the Semi-Finals of the V10 R-League. There they faced a confident and rapid Aston Martin team.
In the team race at Silverstone it was McLaren’s star man James Baldwin who led through Eau Rouge and on to the Kemmel Straight. Right behind him though, was Aston Martin’s Lucas Blakeley.
Using the slipstream and a skinny rear wing, Blakeley was able to get alongside and past the McLaren Shadow man, and the other green machines were right on his tail. Entering Les Combes, Baldwin made his first big mistake of the season, losing the rear and spinning off, giving a commanding lead to the Aston Martin cars.
Syncronised spinning
The flowing nature of Silverstone just encourages close, wheel-to-wheel, battles and at the start of the relay race between Williams and Aston Martin that is exactly what we got.
Down the Wellington Straight on the first lap, Aston Martin’s Daniele Haddad was able to get the inside line on Kuba Brzezinski into Brooklands, but that turned into the outside for Luffield.
Haddad took the lead and made to cover the inside, but Brzezinski was already there.
The two touched and spun in stereo into the gravel.
Once they got going again it was Brzezinski in the lead, but he got too greedy out of Stowe and put it into the wall on the inside, with Haddad only just avoiding him on his way into the pits.
Final corner drama
Williams & Aston Martin weren’t done there though.
In the team race at Silverstone it was Brzezinski and Shanaka Clay that got into it. Battling to salvage a draw, Brzezinski was perhaps trying to back Clay into his teammates. Either way, the Aston Martin driver got a clean run out of Maggots-Becketts and was all over the Williams down Hangar Straight.
As Clay went to the outside around Stowe the two went side-by-side, only to then swap sides into Vale, where eventually the two would wash wide and finish behind Haddad and Martin Stefanko.
Monza magic
Anything can happen around Monza, and YAS Heat & BMW proved that as they battled hard for a Semi-Final place.
In the team race, the fight for third heated up as Alen Terzic in the BMW and Manuel Biancolilla in the YAS Heat got a great run out of Ascari on Cedric Thome.
Thome tried to hold the inside into Parabolica, and just about managed to hold onto third. He also boxed Terzic out.
That allowed Biancolilla to come flying through to third. The Heat cars ran side-by-side down the pit straight, but that gave Terzic an enormous tow and he was soon trying to split his opponents.
As he moved between them and then tried to get onto the racing line disaster struck, and he clipped the front of Thome’s car.
The contact sent Thome into the air, while Terzic span several times and ended up beyond the chicane, getting going again in third place!
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