Lauter ‘Spec’ World Champion after dominant display
Awesomatix’s Simon Lauter is the new ISTC ‘Spec’ World Champion, the German putting on a dominant display of driving at Finishline RC Raceway in California to secured the title in A2. Only the second running of the World Championship for the 17.5 Spec class, having finished runner-up to Alexandre Duchet 2-year ago at the inaugural event in Italy, Lauter made the trip to the US with just one goal in mind and executed a near perfectly campaign. Securing the TQ and winning A1 with ease, the back to back European Champion once again pulled clear of the field in A2 with one onlooker commenting that his race was the definition of the ‘perfect driving’. The only driver to top Lauter over the 6 qualifiers, Max Mächler would win A3 to make it a 1-2 for Awesomatix, the latter having given the manufacturer their first World title when he won the 1:12 Spec title in Florida last year. As the outgoing ‘Spec’ Champions Xray would complete the podium in Bakersfield with Jan Ratheisky, the German driver chasing home Mächler in A3 having taken P3 in the second A-Main after his body tuck in A1.
Summing his World title success the 29-year-old said, ‘I’m just super happy everything worked out, we did a lot of practice, a lot of preparation, we worked hard for this, and I think the performance of the week showed it is quite deserved. The last Worlds were quite unsatisfying with an unlucky A3 in Gubbio, but this was kind of a redemption and exactly the result we worked hard for for 2-years. As I said before it was clear it was going to be my last Stock race so that is the perfect end. We are the World Champion, two times European Champion in a row, 1:12 Stock (European) Champion, that is it, now I can fully focus on Modified and I am looking forward to this a lot.’ Asked about his dominant performance he said, ‘It always helps if I have Max behind me because we get along very well and I can trust him 100% all the time. Usually we stand next to each other in the driver stand as well to have a little exchanges on what is doing on and calculate or whatever. This time with all this stuff going from P3 and upwards it was quite confident that we could roll it home but still you need to keep the focus. I am super happy for the team and super happy for Max scoring the P2 and in the end even Marc could have finished even higher in Modified which shows that the car was excellent at week and the team result is quite impressive. I think we had 7 cars in the Spec A-Main. Even though we are not one of the biggest teams we are one of those teams that can perform under pressure and do a very good job.’
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