It was the USA’s Mitchell DeJong who proved the fastest man round Silverstone to start with. DeJong set the pole position time for the sprint race by just 0.002 seconds from Dayne Warren, with Job in third alongside Tommy Ostgaard.
A busy early couple of laps saw DeJong effectively gap the field behind him, in part helped by Warren, Job, and Ostgaard tussling through the first few corners. Ostgaard tried to take third with a dive into Vale, allowing Charlie Collins and Rogers past, before Rogers slipped past his team-mate and onto Job’s tail.
Unusually, Job made a braking error in Stowe corner, which let Rogers take third place from him. The Australian wasn’t done there either, making short work of Dayne Warren in the same corner. DeJong was too far ahead though, and took the win, with Rogers, Warren, Job, and Collins rounding out the top five.
With Ostgaard slipping to eighth place, the Norwegian took the feature race pole next to Mack Bakkum, but he didn’t have Bakkum behind for long. Job carved through from his fifth place on the grid to pass Collins in the Loop, team-mate Graham Carroll in Stowe, and then Bakkum in the Loop the following lap. After closing the gap to Ostgaard, Job made the pass for the lead into Stowe. However Ostgaard wasn’t willing to give up easily and the two went door to door through Vale and Club. Having taken the place back, Ostgaard appeared to lose sight of Job on the outside and drifted into his path without having cleared the British driver. That sent the pair off the circuit, and allowed Bakkum and Rogers into the lead. Job recovered to third, with a little help from rear-gunner Carroll, but Ostgaard, with damage, dropped back to ninth. Amazingly, Job was able to get past Bakkum at the halfway point, putting himself right onto Rogers’ rear wing. More surprisingly, he passed Rogers shortly after to retake the lead – though Rogers didn’t seem too keen to fight it, perhaps to help his tyre degradation. That set up a thrilling last lap battle, with the lead six within a second of one another. Rogers seemed to have got the pass done down the Hangar Straight, only for Job to hang it round the outside of Stowe and take the inside line for Vale. Job held on to take the win from Rogers, with Bakkum third ahead of Carroll, Collins, and DeJong. A huge incident involving the six cars behind saw Kevin Ellis Jr finish seventh but on his door handles after a tangle with Ayhancan Guven pitched him sideways across the track and poleaxed by the helpless Jeremy Bouteloup.
The results see Rogers retain his championship lead and extend it by a point from Mitchell DeJong, but defending champion Job is now third in the standings and has closed the gap between the two by six points.
For the second successive weekend, North Macedonia’s Erhan Jajovski showed a clear pair of heels to the entire Formula E grid in the Accelerate esports championship. Once again, Jajovski put his Venturi on pole position, this time at the Hong Kong street circuit, by 0.03s from Red Bull’s Frederik Rasmussen who’s driving for the Dragon Penske team.
As we saw in the previous round at New York, Jajovski built up a reasonably comfortable lead in the early stages, getting up to three seconds clear of Rasmussen. However the Danish driver nibbled that advantage away to nearly nothing by the closing laps of the race, courtesy of later attack mode deployments – setting the fastest lap in the process. Ultimately Rasmussen couldn’t get quite close enough to make an attack for the lead, giving Jajovski back-to-back, lights-to-flag wins. Kevin Siggy Rebernak again took third place, to put him second overall in the championship, some 25 points back on Jajovski. Rasmussen now sits third overall, ten points further behind.
Williams F1 driver George Russell returned to Virtual Grand Prix action this weekend, and took victory at Silverstone in the feature race. Russell started from fifth, courtesy of Williams Esports F1 driver Alvaro Carreton’s finish in the sprint race – a race won by former F1 Esports champion and new Ferrari Esports driver Brendon Leigh. However, the F1 driver soon hit the front, alongside Red Bull’s 2020 F1 driver, and 2021 DTM racer, Alex Albon.
The duo eventually finished the 26-lap race with a handy advantage over Callum Ilott’s Ferrari, but although Albon crossed the finish line first he faced a three-second time penalty for multiple track limits violations and was relegated to second.
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