Brazil’s Adriano Carrazza won the Americas region of the GT Sport FIA Online Championship after his final race win settled a three-way points tie with Chile’s Angel Inostroza and Canadian Andrew Brooks. It was Nicolas Rubilar, also of Chile, who set the early pace though. Former World Tour winner Rubilar had a relatively comfortable lights-to-flag win at Interlagos in the Hyundai Genesis Gr.3 – Gran Turismo’s in-game GT3 equivalent – with Brooks coming home second almost four seconds behind and just ahead of Inostroza.
Brooks then took the second race at Laguna Seca, after an incident involving the lead pairing of Inostroza and polesitter Lucas Bonelli. With two laps remaining, Inostroza misjudged Bonelli’s braking into turn six, allowing Brooks to sneak past both. A two-second penalty wasn’t enough to swap the South Americans again, with Inostroza coming home in second ahead of the Brazilian Bonelli.
The final double-points race put the drivers into the X2019 prototype, a car based on a design by Red Bull’s Adrian Newey. This time it was Carrazza on pole, and he converted that to a narrow win over the 25-lap race, ahead of Inostroza who opted for an unorthodox tyre strategy – running the mandatory hard and medium tyres for a single lap each, and the rest of the race on softs. He couldn’t catch Carrazza though, and had to settle for his third successive podium of the night, with Brooks coming in just behind.
That put all three drivers on 38 points for the day, with the tie-breaker being the final race result. This put Carrazza, who’d almost won the World Tour in Tokyo last year but missed out to Ryota Kokubun by under half a second, on top due to that final race win.
Despite beating Inostroza in two of the races, and winning one, Brooks had to settle for third. Bonelli snatched fourth place in the final race and overall, securing the final qualification spot for December’s World Final.
2018 world champion Igor Fraga was also involved in the regional final but endured a pretty difficult day with a best finish of seventh. That result, along with the absence of 2019 champion Mikail Hizal from last week’s EMEA regional final, guarantees that there’ll be a new world champion in 2020.
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