CAS-iRacing Community

Setting

The Autódromo Internacional do Algarve above Portimão was built in 2008 in seven months, for around €195 million, and it is known as the roller coaster: blind crests, steep drops and braking zones that start while the car is still going downhill. Formula 1 came here in 2020, and Lewis Hamilton took his record 92nd win. For the Porsche Cup it was the penultimate round of Season 5. Conditions were dry and around 20 °C, and the Feature ran from dusk into full darkness.

Once again eight cars took the start, from 27 drivers registered for the season. Among them was a newcomer: Moritz Reiniger, a Swiss driver talked into it by Remo Grossenbacher and entered for the same team, Big Point Racing. He logged on only seconds before qualifying. Two sprints of 15 laps were run, with standing starts and no safety cars. Strength of field was 2142.

Qualifying

This was Lone Qualifying with three laps each. Maurice Becker opened on a 1:42.5 and improved on his last lap to 1:42.050 for pole. Remo Grossenbacher spent most of the session without a valid time. He found one on his final lap, a 1:42.505, which put him second and 0.455 s back. Klaus Oberländer was third (1:43.240) and Reiniger fourth on his first ever CAS session (1:43.812). Behind them came Jan Tobias Schrader (1:44.922), Antonio Cursio (1:46.587) and Jürgen Michael Kraft (1:48.708). Mario A Berger set no valid lap, collected seven incident points in the session and started from the back.

Race 1 — Heat, 15 laps, standing start

Grossenbacher got the better of Becker on the opening lap and then held him off for most of the race. From lap 2 to lap 14 the gap was never more than six tenths, and usually one or two. Becker kept looking around the outside, while Grossenbacher kept the inside line and gave him nothing. Their lap times were almost identical, in the low 1:42s, with Becker setting the race's fastest lap of 1:41.988 on lap 5. Oberländer, running alone in third, was losing around a second a lap to the pair.

The midfield moved more. Reiniger passed Oberländer early on. In the booth's words, he gave him „leicht von hinten ein bisschen“. Then he spun on his own on lap 2 and fell to seventh. He recovered to fifth by lap 8, the last of those places taken from Cursio. Schrader took fourth from Cursio on lap 4 when the Italian ran wide, a move the booth called clean. Berger spun by himself on lap 5 while trying to pass Cursio.

The race was decided on the final lap. Becker was still right behind Grossenbacher when the two cars touched and Grossenbacher spun. The telemetry logs a loss of control for both at the same moment, with two incident points each, and both lost around seven seconds on that lap. Becker got going first and crossed the line 1.948 s ahead. Grossenbacher kept second because Oberländer had been 15 seconds behind. The commentator's reading live: „Ich hätte jetzt gesagt, zum Eifer des Gefechts war es wahrscheinlich, hat der Mauris den Remo umgedreht.“ He added straight away: „Es war keine Absicht, das ist klar.“ CLS lists no penalty for the round.

Race 1 classification: Becker, Grossenbacher, Oberländer, Schrader, Reiniger, Cursio, Berger, Kraft. Fastest lap: Maurice Becker, 1:41.988.

Race 2 — Feature, 15 laps, reversed grid

With eight cars, the top-8 inversion reversed the whole field. That put Kraft on pole, Berger second, and Grossenbacher and Becker on the last row. Kraft started well, but Berger was past him almost immediately and then took a kerb far too hard and was launched off it. In the next few seconds the telemetry records two separate contacts: Berger with Cursio, then Reiniger, Becker and Oberländer together, with Reiniger spinning. The cameras did not catch either clearly, and this report does not assign them. Kraft was also caught up in a contact, went backwards and stopped in the pits at the end of lap 1 for three and a half minutes. He rejoined and finished two laps down.

When the field came round, Grossenbacher was leading from seventh on the grid, and Becker was second from eighth. Even the commentator could not say how it had happened: „Ich weiß nicht, wie er das gemacht hat, dass der alle überholt hat.“ From there the race was a two-car rerun of the Heat with the roles reversed. Becker came down from 2.3 s after lap 1 to around three tenths by lap 9, and was a tenth or two behind over the final laps. He set the fastest lap again, a 1:42.195. Grossenbacher again held the inside line and did not make a mistake. On the last lap Becker's final attempt came to nothing for lack of traction, and the gap at the flag was 0.593 s. Grossenbacher led every lap.

Behind them was a four-car fight that the broadcast spent most of its time on. Oberländer passed Schrader on lap 4, and Schrader said afterwards he had waved him through. Oberländer then took Cursio for third on lap 8 with a move up the inside; he thinks there was „eine ganz kleine Berührung“ at Turn 1. After that he pulled clear, finishing on his best lap of the night, a 1:42.889 on the final lap. Reiniger and Schrader swapped places several times. Reiniger got by on lap 7 and Schrader came back on lap 8. Reiniger passed him again, then spun by himself on lap 11 and fell to sixth. On the last lap he outbraked Schrader, Schrader came back at him with a light touch, and Reiniger went up the inside under braking to take fifth. He finished barely a second behind Cursio, who held on to fourth, his best result of the night.

Berger was shown the black flag on lap 12, at the same moment his incident count reached 16, and served the penalty in the pits on that lap. He finished seventh, a lap down, on 18 incident points.

Race 2 classification: Grossenbacher, Becker, Oberländer, Cursio, Reiniger, Schrader, Berger (+1 lap), Kraft (+2 laps). Fastest lap: Maurice Becker, 1:42.195.

The round

On combined points the round was a dead heat: Grossenbacher 76, Becker 76, then Oberländer 60 with third place in both races, and Cursio, Schrader and Reiniger on 46 each. Berger scored 36 and Kraft 32. The incident columns show how differently the two leaders got there: Grossenbacher had 11 for the round and Becker 20. Reiniger had 21 and Berger 25, while Kraft had only 3. Driver of the Day: Maurice Becker, merit 0.784, ahead of Grossenbacher, Schrader and Reiniger.

Post-race

Four of the eight drivers came on air afterwards, which the commentator called a record. Grossenbacher took the Heat calmly: „Ich hatte glaube ich schon lange nicht mehr so viel Spaß beim Verteidigen.“ On the contact itself: „Ich bin der Meinung, ich habe nichts falsch gemacht. Maurice hat sich zumindest mal entschuldigt.“ He said he would sleep on it before deciding anything further, and added that he did not think it was deliberate.

Becker took the blame without hedging: „Da wollte ich halt immer ein bisschen mehr und ein bisschen mehr, und dann ist es doch zu viel … geht auf meine Kappe.“ He said he drove the Feature more calmly and waited for a mistake, which never came.

Oberländer, more than happy with two thirds, summed up the front two: „Maurice und Remo, das sind zwei Aliens, die sind vom anderen Stern.“ On Cursio's flash of the headlights after their Feature pass: „Italiener, ein bisschen heißblütig, aber nie böse gemeint.“ Schrader said he had driven the circuit for the first time the day before and found Cursio very hard to pass. He thought Reiniger's moves were pushy but not malicious.

Championship after Round 7

Since Donington the two have matched each other exactly, with 76 points apiece at both Zolder and the Algarve. So the gap is still two points: Remo Grossenbacher 402, Maurice Becker 400. A long way back come Andre Brechmann (208, absent here), Jan Tobias Schrader up four places to fourth (206), and Alex Gründel (205). Then come Antonio Cursio, up five places (183), Dominique Meyers (182), Benedikt Barth (176), Mario A Berger (168), and Klaus Oberländer, up four places (162, level with Benjamin Schlosser). Both title contenders have started six of the seven rounds, and there is one drop result. The finale at the Hungaroring on 22 October is therefore effectively a straight fight: Becker has to outscore Grossenbacher on the night, and by more than two points.

Notes from the booth

• Small field, big fights: „Lieber sind acht Autos auf der Strecke und wir haben schöne Zweikämpfe als 20 und alle sind zwei, drei Sekunden voneinander weg.“ Nine drivers had confirmed, five had declined and twelve had not answered at all. The commentator is considering more participation points to bring the numbers back up.
• Is the rookie scored? On air, whether Reiniger would count for this season was left open to discuss with Andreas. CLS has since scored him: 46 points, 18th in the table.
• Schrader-Cam was back as a picture-in-picture feed from Jan Tobias Schrader's own YouTube stream, after a refresh to get it running.
• The title-fight overlay showed the wrong gap after the Feature. The real margin, confirmed by CLS, is two points.
• Season 6 preview: a provisional eight-round calendar was shown, including Summit Point, the Red Bull Ring, the Sachsenring, Barcelona, Montreal, Hockenheim and Laguna Seca. All dates will still move by a week. Andreas is also preparing a casual fun league with open-ended points and a vote on tracks, to replace the NASCAR series.
• The booth's reference for a fast lap here was a 1:44.582 in an older Cup Porsche. Both leaders ran nearly two and a half seconds quicker.
• Next and final round: Hungaroring, Thursday 22 October 2026.

Summary of the CAS Community Twitch broadcast by Thomas Herbrig. Grids, lap times, gaps, laps led and incident points are taken from the iRacing event result (subsession 89218906). The classification, round points, championship table and Driver of the Day come from CAS League Scoring (CLS). Lap-by-lap positions, the pit stops, the black flag and incident timing are built from the iCASControl in-sim telemetry recording. Where the broadcast could not establish who caused an incident, this report does not speculate.

Setting

Donington Park is a genuine up-and-down circuit in the English Midlands, opened in the 1930s around roads that already ran through the park, and the twelve corners still carry their old names — Redgate, the Craner Curves, the Esses, the Melbourne hairpin, Goddards. It has hosted exactly one Formula 1 race, in 1993, and that race is remembered for Ayrton Senna's opening lap in the wet. Thirty-three years later the Porsche Cup arrived to find the same weather: rain before the session, standing water on several kerbs, the overlay reading moderately wet, 19 °C air over a 22.6 °C track under a closed sky. The booth had driven the circuit himself that morning on a near-dry surface and put dry pace in the 1:28s — roughly nine to ten seconds a lap went to the water.

Only eight drivers took the start, down from fifteen at Oschersleben. The wet was the obvious reason; the booth also pointed to the iRacing update still downloading for some, and to one regular being unwell. Strength of field 2638. Two sprints of 16 laps, standing starts, no safety cars, no penalties and no protests all evening.

Qualifying

Lone Qualifying, three laps each. Maurice Becker worked down 1:39.7, 1:38.2, 1:37.756 for pole, 0.465 s clear of Benedikt Barth (1:38.221), who found it on his very last lap. Jonas Kremer was six or seven tenths up on his final run and threw it away, ending third on 1:38.764. Then Don Utz (1:39.577), Andre Brechmann (1:40.802), Mario A Berger (1:41.170) and Jan Tobias Schrader (1:42.136). Benjamin Schlosser set no lap at all — eight incident points in the session — and lined up eighth. On air the missing eighth time was never traced to a driver; the commentator wondered aloud whether his own overlay had dropped a row.

Race 1 — Heat, 16 laps, standing start

Becker converted pole cleanly and Kremer went with him, but the Donington kerbs started collecting cars almost immediately: Kremer lost the rear and dropped behind Barth, and Don Utz locked up into Melbourne and fell to last inside three laps. Then Becker made his one mistake of the race, braking too late and running wide on lap 6, and Barth led lap 7 — the only lap of the evening led by anyone other than Becker or, later, Schlosser and Barth in the Feature. Becker took it straight back on lap 8 with a clean move down the inside, and the booth was careful to say Barth had not erred; he had simply been outbraked.

From there it was a control drive: fastest lap 1:36.889 on lap 10, one incident point across the whole race on a soaking circuit, 11.651 s in hand at the flag. Barth held second until lap 13, when he lost the car and handed the place to Kremer; he crossed the line 14.188 s down. The drive of the race belonged to Benjamin Schlosser: no qualifying time, last on the grid, four overtakes, and fourth at the flag with the second-quickest lap of the race (1:37.205). None of his passes made it onto the broadcast — the booth only noticed the result. Brechmann took fifth, Utz recovered to sixth, Schrader seventh and Berger eighth.

Race 1 top five: Becker, Kremer, Barth, Schlosser, Brechmann. Fastest lap: Maurice Becker, 1:36.889.

Race 2 — Feature, 16 laps, fully reversed grid

The full inversion put Mario A Berger on pole and Becker on the back row. Jan Tobias Schrader led laps 1 and 2 from reverse-grid second and held the place convincingly. Then two things happened on lap 3. Schlosser outbraked Brechmann and took over in front, running laps 3 to 7 as leader; and behind them Becker put two wheels on the wet grass, lost the braking and hit Schrader. The booth called it as it saw it — „Das war ein Rennunfall. Kann passieren.“ and „da würde ich wirklich keinerlei Absicht hinter vermuten“ — and Schrader said the same afterwards. Becker took three incident points and fell to last; Schrader took four and tyre damage, stopped at the end of lap 6 for a 26.6 s repair, rejoined half a minute adrift and never featured again, finishing 96.273 s down.

Barth worked past Kremer at Goddards, moved ahead of Schlosser and led from lap 8 to the flag — nine laps in front of a field that never got near him again, and a zero-incident race. Mid-race Schlosser spun on his own and Kremer, following, went off avoiding him; the commentator's reading was that the spin caused it, with his own caveat „wenn ich das richtig erkannt habe“. Kremer never recovered and finished sixth on eleven incident points.

The second half belonged to Becker's recovery: last on lap 4, second by lap 13, ten overtakes including an outside pass on Schlosser, and the fastest lap of the entire evening — 1:36.734 on lap 10. He finished 2.884 s behind Barth. The quiet performance was Don Utz, fourth at the flag on zero incident points with a 1:37.593 best; his pass on Brechmann for the place was not caught on camera either.

Race 2 top five: Barth, Becker, Schlosser, Utz, Brechmann. Fastest lap: Maurice Becker, 1:36.734.

The round

Combined points: Becker 76, Barth 71, Schlosser 56, Kremer 55, Utz 46, Brechmann 46, Berger 34, Schrader 34. Driver of the Day: Maurice Becker, merit 0.954. The incident columns tell the other half of the story — Barth three for the round, Utz four, Berger four, against sixteen for Kremer and thirteen for Schrader.

Post-race: Jan Tobias Schrader

Schrader came on after the race and confirmed the booth's reading of the contact — he had been waving Becker through and the hit caught him completely unprepared: „Und Maurice hätte ich eine Runde weiter durchgelassen. Und dann ist er mir reingeknallt und ich habe mich so erschrocken, weil ich da auch gar nicht mit gerechnet habe und schoss einmal übers Feld rüber.“ On the damage: „Gut, und ja, also ich hatte seit Maurice, dank Maurice Schaden gehabt. Reifenschaden. Und ich hab gedacht, ich bleib aber draußen, solange ich fahren kann.“ Late on he spun in a puddle while trying to let Becker by and beached it in the gravel — „Ich wollte ihn extra Platz machen und durch den Schaden und eine Wasserpfütze habe ich mich gedreht.“ — and still refused to park it: „Für mich ist natürlich immer klar, Rennen werden komplett zu Ende gefahren.“ He closed with credit to the man who had put him there: „Also ganz großes Lob an Maurice, also bis auf, dass er mich abgeschossen hat. Von der Pace super gefahren.“

The commentator's verdict on the winner: „Und der Benedikt hat es super gemacht. Der ist fehlerfrei durchgefahren, das erste zweite Rennen und hat gewonnen. Während die anderen halt alle so kleine Fehler hatten, die schnellen Fahrer.“

Championship after Round 5

Neither Remo Grossenbacher nor Alex Gründel started at Donington, and 76 points in one night turned the table on its head. Grossenbacher still leads on 250, but Maurice Becker is now second on 248 — a deficit of two points where it was 78 a fortnight ago. Then Gründel (205), Dominique Meyers (182), Benedikt Barth up three places to fifth (176), Benjamin Schlosser (162), Willi Brand (159), Andre Brechmann (148), René Hollerung (138) and Jan Tobias Schrader (118). Three rounds remain.

Notes from the booth

• An eight-car field has one upside, as the commentator put it: „man kann sagen, es ist überschaubar das Feld. Das macht es für mich etwas einfacher natürlich dem allem zu folgen.“
• Schrader-Cam: Jan Tobias Schrader's own YouTube stream was embedded as a picture-in-picture feed. It runs a few seconds out of step with the iRacing feed — the two concluded afterwards that Twitch and YouTube simply carry different delays.
• The stream itself is back to 1080p after having been stuck at 720p last time out, and the microphone level has been raised.
• Long plug for the CLS Stint Planner, free to any CLS or Discord member: iRacing's Insights pace-by-iRating graphs can be read straight into it as reference times for endurance planning.
• New PCCD season, registration open: it starts 22 September at Silverstone, and participation points will no longer be dropped — drivers who turn up for more than nine races keep the PCP even on a dropped result.
• Elsewhere in CAS: SFL next at Brands Hatch on the 16th, IEC next at Fuji on 3 October, the Combined Cup round at Navarra pushed to Friday by the iRacing update, and NASCAR at Charlotte on 18 September.
• Four moments the cameras missed: Schlosser's four passes in the Heat, Utz's pass on Brechmann for fourth in the Feature, Barth taking the lead in the Feature, and the identity of the driver with no qualifying time.
• Next round: Zolder, Thursday 24 September 2026 — the commentator flagged he may not be able to stream that one.

Summary of the CAS Community Twitch broadcast by Thomas Herbrig. Grids, lap times, gaps and incident points taken from the iRacing event result (subsession 88584369); the classification, round points and Driver of the Day come from CAS League Scoring (CLS); lap-by-lap positions, overtakes, pit stops and incident timing are built from the iCASControl in-sim telemetry recording. Where the broadcast could not establish who caused an incident, this report does not speculate.

Setting

The International Endurance Championship went into its fourth season with the format rebuilt from the ground up. Six rounds instead of the old calendar, three hours instead of six, solo entries allowed, drivers permitted to move between teams to fill the grid — and, for the first time, a genuine three-class field: Dallara P217 LMP2, GT3 2025 and, replacing last season's GT4 class, the Porsche 911 Cup (992.2). Thirty-seven cars were entered across ninety registered drivers, strength of field 2272.

Sebring International, 6.01 km and seventeen corners of concrete and patched asphalt, is the hardest opener this series could have picked. Clear, 25 °C air over a 31 °C track, in-sim afternoon. The winner covered 92 laps, there were ten lead changes and exactly one caution — and that caution was not caused by anything that happened on track.

Qualifying

Lone qualifying. Daniel Langehegermann put WS Racing eSports LMP2 I on overall pole with 1:48.971, under two tenths clear of Martin Spieler's PWA E-Sports #BackFisch (1:49.146); Hendrik Stanzel (NEON Simsports Yellow, 1:49.467) and Timo Wulff (Jurassic Kart Racing T-Rex, 1:49.489) were within half a second. In GT3 Timo Elges took class pole for Jurassic Kart Racing Velociraptor with 1:59.863, the only GT3 driver under two minutes, from Michael Gasser (2:00.156) and NEON Simsports Blue (2:00.438). The Porsche Cup went to Thomas Kuebler and CAS-Tech Performance Blue on 2:02.228.

Qualifying also produced the evening's first problem. Cars that set no time were put to the back of the entire field rather than the back of their own class, so an LMP2 and a GT3 lined up behind the Porsche Cup. Race director André confirmed on air that this was a server-side mistake: „Das ist ein Fehler gewesen vom Server oder von den Einstellungen des Servers. Normalerweise sollten die innerhalb ihrer eigenen Klasse hinten starten.“ The old rule requiring a driver without a time to start from the pit lane no longer exists in the current iRacing build.

The opening hour

The class-by-class rolling start was clean at the front and expensive at the back. In the Porsche Cup, Bela Brünger (KEK Racing) spun and collected Thomas Herbrig, who had just inherited the class lead: „Ich habe jetzt gerade einen Meatball erwischt. Der ist mir reingefahren gerade … Er hat sich gedreht und ich wollte dann links an ihm vorbei.“ Herbrig later lost the car on his own and withdrew from the event entirely on a family emergency. Timmy Kaiser (Void Crown Racing), the highest-rated driver in the field, parked his damaged LMP2 after two laps.

Then the hardware started failing. Andre Brechmann lost up- and downshifts on his wheel; Andreas Leberer got stuck in third gear and handed CAS-Tech Endurance Black to Johann Solowej mid-stint — „Meine Shifter laufen gerade nicht mehr. Ich bin im dritten Gang hängen geblieben.“ Andreas in the booth: „Es scheint so eine Krankheit hier heute zu sein.“ By the end the chat had counted six wheelbase failures across the field, plus Hubert Diethard disconnecting repeatedly out of the DanKüchen LMP2.

The race-control crash

Around two-thirds distance a Full Course Yellow appeared with nothing visible to justify it. Andreas called the race director live on stream, and André explained it plainly:

„Mein Rechner beziehungsweise iRacing ist abgestürzt. Und die Software für die Rennleitung, die läuft ja auf dem Rechner. Und als ich mich wieder eingeloggt habe, hat er alle Incidents auf einmal genommen, zusammengerechnet und hatte dadurch diese gelbe Flagge ausgelöst. Plus schwarze Flaggen — aber die schwarzen Flaggen habe ich wieder entfernt. Aber die Yellow Flag, die kann ich nicht entfernen.“

iRacing and the race-control software were running on the same machine. When both came back up, the software re-counted every car's incidents from zero and added them to what it already held — effectively doubling them. Seven black flags went out within nine seconds; twenty-four more followed before the chequered flag. André cleared the flags as fast as he could, but a drive-through already served cannot be un-served, and the Full Course Yellow could not be cancelled at all. The field ran three laps behind the pace car with the pit lane closed and restarted single file — which is where the LMP2 order was shuffled into a WS Racing one-two. On air, a rerun of the whole race was openly discussed. „Das erste Rennen darf ja auch mal was schieflaufen“, said André.

LMP2

WS Racing eSports LMP2 I led 52 of the 92 laps and won it properly — Langehegermann and Fabian Buhl sharing the car, three incident points between them for the whole race, 36.2 s clear at the flag. Behind them the class produced the drive of the night: Benjamin Höft, alone in the Alemannia Aachen White car for three hours, from thirteenth on the class grid to second, leading four laps of it along the way. WS Racing LMP2 II completed the podium with Florian Eigner, who lost the car on the final lap trying to take second and kept third anyway.

Hendrik Stanzel (NEON Simsports Yellow) ran at the front for a long stretch — twenty-two laps led, more than anyone bar the winner — before the incident count caught up with the car. Martin Spieler set the fastest lap of the entire race, 1:49.021, and finished fourth. Manfred Baar took the DanKüchen car to fifth after his team-mate's connection had made a mess of the middle of the race.

GT3

The GT3 race was decided by attrition at the front. Michael Gasser (Flying Arrow Racing, solo in a McLaren) led for well over an hour and set the class's fastest lap at 1:59.912, then took a black flag for accumulated track limits, dropped to third, made contact with Matthias Eggert while fighting back, spun, needed a tow and retired on lap 57. Pole-sitter Timo Elges came home twelfth in class after a race of his own troubles.

Which left Andre N Villela, alone in the DaRoAn Acura, to do what he does: nothing dramatic at all. Fourth on the class grid, first at the flag by 30.3 s, and two incident points in three hours — the lowest figure of any car in the race. NEON Simsports Blue (Jens Krämer and Justin Christiansen) took second. The fight for the last podium place went to JuHa Racing, Jozef-Frederik Suto holding off Christoph Kiesel's WS Racing Mustang after both had picked up black flags in the aftermath of their own contact.

Porsche Cup

Only five Cup cars started and only two finished on the class lead lap. Kevin Küpper (Alemannia Aachen Yellow) and Antonio Cursio (CAS-Tech Performance Blue) traded the class lead several times in a genuinely clean fight, including a Küpper move into turn one and an immediate answer from Cursio. Küpper eventually got clear and won by 30.2 s with the class's fastest lap, 2:01.469; Thomas Kuebler brought the CAS-Tech car home second after taking over from Cursio.

Don Utz deserves the footnote. Moving over to let an LMP2 through, he was hit hard enough to lock a rear wheel, took a very long repair, and still came back out to finish third in class, eight laps down. It is the kind of result the three-hour format was designed to reward.

Post-race: correcting the penalties

The stewards did not rerun the race. They reconstructed it. Working from the official iRacing result, the race-logger recording, a full replay run, the stream transcript and an independent breakdown by Johann Solowej, the review established for each car how many drive-throughs its final, official incident total actually justified, and how many it served. Two analyses done separately arrived at the same count.

Eight cars served one drive-through too many — #42 GoSquadra, #98 JuHa Racing, #169 Jurassic Kart Racing T-Rex, #18 NEON Orange, #13 NEON White, #19 NEON Yellow, #3 Pure Performance 2 and #146 WS Racing GT3 I — and were credited 13 seconds each, the measured value of a drive-through at Sebring across all three classes. The same rule ran in reverse: #1 Dat muss Kesseln! finished on 25 incidents, owed one drive-through and never served it, and had 13 seconds added. Anyone who simply ignored an unjustified black flag lost no time and was credited nothing. Two black flags with unrelated causes — an unsafe pit entrance and a closing-pit penalty — were excluded.

The effect on the classification is exactly two positions: in LMP2, Jurassic Kart Racing T-Rex moves up to eighth and NEON Simsports #62 down to ninth. Everything else stands as raced. The full per-car balance was published to the teams before the result went live, and the corrected classification was reviewed by André, Andreas and Johann before publication.

Championship after Round 1

LMP2: WS Racing eSports LMP2 I 107, Alemannia Aachen White 97, WS Racing eSports LMP2 II 87, PWA E-Sports #BackFisch 79, DanKüchen Motorsport 77.
GT3: DaRoAn 107, NEON Simsports Blue 97, JuHa Racing 86, WS Racing eSports GT3 I 81, WS Racing eSports GT3 II 77.
Porsche Cup: Alemannia Aachen Yellow 106, CAS-Tech Performance Blue 97, CAS-Tech Performance Green 86.

Notes from the booth

• The Porsche Cup runs without BOP in this series — „Den müsst ihr so schlagen“ — while the LMP2 carries roughly 50–60 hp more and 30 kg less than last season's balance.
• Solo entries are explicitly allowed and drivers may be lent between teams to fill the grid; only the team result is scored.
• Prize money in iRacing credits for the top three, with a minimum of seven race starts to qualify, plus the Gentleman Driver Challenge.
• Protests remain open through the cooldown period after the race.
• The race-logger recording behind this report is the same iCASControl toolset the league uses live; the incident-point tracking added for Sebring is what made the penalty reconstruction possible at all.
• Next round: Fuji International Speedway, Saturday 3 October 2026, three hours.

Summary of the CAS Community Twitch broadcast by Thomas Herbrig. Grids, lap times, laps led and incident points are taken from the iRacing event result (subsession 88492179); the classification, the championship points and the Team of the Day come from CAS League Scoring (CLS) and include the stewards' penalty correction; the penalty reconstruction and the drive-through timings are built from the iCASControl race-logger recording. Where the broadcast could not establish who caused an incident, this report does not speculate.

Setting

Round 4 brought the Porsche Cup back to Germany and to the halfway point of the season — four rounds down, four to go. The Motorsport Arena Oschersleben is a 3.7 km, 14-corner circuit in Saxony-Anhalt, and it turned out to be a place where the racing was close and the passing was very hard. Two features decided the evening: the chicane, the one spot where a driver could genuinely get alongside, so nearly every overtake of the night started there; and the fast right-hander immediately after it, which collected car after car as drivers lost the rear on its exit. Fifteen drivers started, up from ten at Oran Park. Dry and clear, around 21 °C, 18 laps per race.

Qualifying

Lone Qualifying, three laps each, and Maurice Becker was in a class of his own: 1:24.244, six tenths clear of Willi Brand (1:24.845). Then Benjamin Schlosser (1:25.139), Andre Brechmann (1:25.236), Dominique Meyers (1:25.262), Remo Grossenbacher (1:25.416) and René Hollerung (1:25.507). Christian Schlosser set no time and started fifteenth.

Race 1 — Heat, 18 laps, standing start

Becker held the inside line into turn 1 against Brand's move around the outside, and that settled it: all 18 laps led, fastest lap of the race, 7.428 s in hand. It was a deliberately controlled drive and the booth read it as a direct answer to Oran Park, where he had thrown away both races. Brand followed him home on one incident point; Grossenbacher came from sixth to third and Hollerung from seventh to fourth. The real racing was in the midfield, and it produced the duel of the night: Jan Tobias Schrader against Antonio Cursio over eighth, lap after lap, with the clearly quicker car behind. Schrader was alongside at the chicane again and again and Cursio shut the door every time — firmly enough that the commentary called it hard, at moments too hard. Five hundredths separated them at the flag. Manfred Baar produced the recovery of the race, four places down on lap 1 and briefly last, then back to eighth. Behind, the circuit took its toll: Christian Schlosser spun after contact and lost eight minutes in the pits, Danny Platzer took a 24.7 s repair and finished a lap down on 13 incident points, and Benjamin Schlosser put it in the wall late but was still classified seventh.

Race 1 top five: Becker, Brand, Grossenbacher, Hollerung, Brechmann. Fastest lap: Maurice Becker, 1:24.311.

Race 2 — Feature, 18 laps, reverse-grid top 8

The inversion put Manfred Baar on pole and dropped Becker to eighth — and Baar jumped the start. The black flag came within seconds of the green and the drive-through ended his race as a contest before lap 1 was out; Dominique Meyers was black-flagged in the same moment and served on lap 1 too. On that same opening lap Baar and Antonio Cursio came together and Cursio went head-on into the wall, needing an 85-second repair. Benjamin Schlosser led the opening third from reverse-grid second and looked completely secure doing it — then lost the rear with nobody near him and handed the lead to Remo Grossenbacher. What settled second was a piece of team discipline: Hollerung, Grossenbacher's Big Point Racing team-mate, saw the Swiss was quicker and waved him through rather than hold him up. Grossenbacher was nine seconds clear by the flag. Hollerung then defended second from Maurice Becker superbly for lap after lap — Becker visibly quicker in several corners and still unable to find a way by — until Hollerung ran wide and spun himself out of it with minutes to go. Klaus Oberländer destroyed his car at the corner after the chicane and was out on lap 12; Christian Schlosser retired after 13.

Race 2 top five: Grossenbacher, Becker, Hollerung, Brand, Brechmann. Fastest lap: Maurice Becker, 1:24.386. Driver of the Day (round): Mario A Berger, merit 0.965.

Championship after Round 4

Remo Grossenbacher has taken the lead on 250 points from Alex Gründel (205), who did not start at Oschersleben — exactly the situation the season's single drop result exists to absorb. Then Dominique Meyers (182), Maurice Becker (172), Willi Brand (159) and René Hollerung (138). Four rounds gone, four to come.

Post-race: Jan Tobias Schrader

Schrader came on stream and cleared up the moment that had puzzled the booth — the point in the Feature where he suddenly let a whole group past. It was not a slowdown penalty: „Nein, hatte ich nicht. Ich bekam ein bisschen Rutschen ins Dreck. Ich hab den Wagen aber gefangen. Und dann sind die an mir vorbeigefahren.“ On his long Heat duel with Cursio: „Ich war ein gutes Stück schneller, aber rankommen und vorbeifahren sind zwei verschiedene Paar Schuhe, und ich wollte mich natürlich nicht irgendwo vorbeidrücken.“ He describes himself as a defensive racer — „wenn es nicht geht, geht nicht“ — and put his own result down to not having practised the circuit.

Notes from the booth

• The field grew back to fifteen after the ten-car low at Oran Park.
• Oschersleben can be rented in real life — roughly €50 for twenty minutes in your own car, floated on air as an idea for a future community outing.
• Calapex got a mention: Maurice Becker's new team-organisation platform, together with the write-up now on this site under Software — with the explicit note that the site is new and still being built out.
• The IEC three-hour multiclass series is still open for entries, solo drivers included.
• Next round: Donington Park, England, Thursday 10 September 2026.

Summary of the CAS Community Twitch broadcast by Thomas Herbrig. Results, grids, lap times and incident points taken from the iRacing event result (subsession 88275827); the Driver of the Day, the round points and the championship table come from CAS League Scoring (CLS); charts and the 2D replays are built from the iCASControl in-sim telemetry recording. Where the broadcast could not establish who caused an incident, this report does not speculate.

Data-derived report. There was no broadcast transcript for this round, so everything below comes from the official iRacing event result, the CLS round and standings pages, and the in-sim iRaceControl telemetry logs. No motive or radio message is attributed to any driver.

Setting

Circuit Zolder in Belgium, in its Alternate configuration — four kilometres, ten corners, and by SFL standards a short lap: the SF Lights 324 needed barely 1:17, so each sprint fitted 16 laps into a little over 21 minutes. Nine of twenty registered drivers took the start. Eike Werner and Harald Pfeufer, who had both sat out the Nürburgring in the heatwave, were back and left with two of the biggest hauls of their season; championship contenders David Hoffmann and Dominic Waack missed the round entirely, as did Pascal Marx. This was Round 5 — the postponed Round 3 closes the season at the Algarve on 14 October.

Qualifying

Three laps, and Lucian Grabowski made it look routine: 1:17.042, pole by 0.871 s. Bernhard Wlach (1:17.913) and Kevin Chmielewski (1:17.991) shared the second row. Behind them it was absurdly tight — Andreas Wuschnakowski (1:19.096) and Thomas Herbrig (1:19.104) split by eight thousandths, Eike Werner (1:19.518) and Harald Pfeufer (1:19.539) by twenty-one. Marcus Rothe collected 15 incident points in the session, set no valid lap, and lined up last.

Race 1 — fifteen laps in the lead, and it goes on the sixteenth

Grabowski converted the pole and led every one of the first fifteen laps, never seriously pressured; by lap 15 he was 8.18 s clear of Chmielewski. Then came the last lap: a 1:27.882, flagged in the telemetry as a +10.46 s slow lap, and Chmielewski went past on a clean 1:18.730 to win by 0.549 s. Grabowski kept the fastest lap of the round (1:16.978, lap 9) and nothing else.

Marcus Rothe was the story behind. From last on the grid he was fifth by the end of lap 2 and third from lap 5, holding the final podium place for eight laps until a 1:25.350 on lap 13 let Bernhard Wlach back through — third at +22.395 s to Rothe’s +23.910 s. His 7 overtakes were the most of the evening. The rest of the order was written in the pit lane: Thomas Herbrig took a repair penalty and a black flag within 25 seconds and spent 78.8 s stationary on lap 3, Andreas Wuschnakowski 61.1 s on lap 4, and Friedrich Luhn — running a strong sixth — 143.1 s on lap 9.

Race 2 — full reverse grid, won from last

The reverse grid put Friedrich Luhn on pole and Chmielewski ninth. Luhn was in the pits 31 seconds after the green with a repair penalty, stopped twice for a combined 318 seconds, collected a black flag and parked after six laps. Thomas Herbrig led from lap 2 and then defended for six laps against Marcus Rothe, up from reverse-grid sixth — 0.04 s apart on lap 7, Rothe in front on lap 8, Herbrig back ahead on lap 9. The two spent 10 of the 16 laps within 1.5 s of each other.

While they fought, Chmielewski arrived: fourth by lap 4, 4.23 s back on lap 8, 0.91 s on lap 9, 0.08 s on lap 13, and ahead from lap 14 for a 4.574 s win with 8 overtakes and no positions lost. Herbrig held second with a zero-incident race and Eike Werner completed the podium at +9.588 s. Rothe crossed the line second on the road, 1.012 s behind the winner, but a black flag shown 16 seconds before the finish left him classified fourth at +35.648 s. Lucian Grabowski — a repair penalty, two stops, two more black flags — finished eighth and a lap down, with the fastest lap of the race.

Round podium & championship

Two wins from two sprints is the maximum this format allows: Kevin Chmielewski 61 pts (25+30+6), from Thomas Herbrig and Eike Werner on 46 each, Marcus Rothe 45, Lucian Grabowski 42, Bernhard Wlach and Harald Pfeufer 41, Andreas Wuschnakowski 38 and Friedrich Luhn 18.

Championship after Round 5 (CLS): P1 Lucian Grabowski 212 · P2 Kevin Chmielewski 201 · P3 Thomas Herbrig 158 · P4 Marcus Rothe 157 · P5 Bernhard Wlach 156 · P6 Andreas Wuschnakowski 144 · P7 Eike Werner 126 · P8 David Hoffmann 108 · P9 Dominic Waack 96 · P10 Pascal Marx 84. The lead is down from 30 points to 11, and third to fifth are covered by two points. Full per-race tables and the 2D replays are in the SFL Race Center.

Next round

Round 6 goes to Jerez GP on 2 September 2026. The postponed Round 3 at the Algarve International Circuit closes the season on 14 October.

No broadcast transcript this round — the report is derived from data throughout. Classification, teams and championship points are from CAS League Scoring (CLS); grid, gaps, best laps and incident points from the official iRacing event result (subsession 88080870); position-by-lap, lap times, pit and penalty timing from the in-sim iRaceControl telemetry logs.

Setting

The Nürburgring Grand-Prix-Strecke in its BES/WEC “no chicane” configuration — 16 turns, about 5.15 km, the layout the endurance series use. What made the round unusual was who was missing: twenty drivers are registered for Season 8 and six withdrew because of the heat — championship third Pascal Marx, fourth Eike Werner, plus Florian Brechmann, Riccardo Cavoto, Thomas Felix and Jim Gallo — leaving nine cars. The irony: after the GT3 WCT raced at Hockenheim in 44 °C track temperature the night before, the Nürburgring served up 19 °C. This was Round 4; Round 3 was postponed by iRacing maintenance and now closes the season at the Algarve on 14 October.

Qualifying

The closest session of the season. Lucian Grabowski and David Hoffmann traded the top slot lap for lap, and Grabowski took it back on his final run with a 1:45.457 — pole by three thousandths over Hoffmann’s 1:45.460. Nobody else got near: Kevin Chmielewski was third seven tenths back, from Andreas Wuschnakowski, Dominic Waack, Marcus Rothe, Bernhard Wlach, Thomas Herbrig and Friedrich Luhn.

Race 1 — a three-thousandth pole, gone in two seconds

Grabowski led into turn one, and two seconds after the green flag the black flag appeared: jump start. He served the drive-through on lap 1 and rejoined last. David Hoffmann inherited the lead before the end of lap 1, led all 12, set the fastest lap and won by 9.99 s. The racing was behind him and it was all Atzen Motorsport — Chmielewski, Rothe and Waack nose-to-tail in P2–P4 for ten laps, until Waack ran wide and waved Rothe through rather than defend a compromised line. On the final lap Bernhard Wlach finally attacked Wuschnakowski for fifth, out-braked himself and spun — handing sixth to the recovering Grabowski.

Race 2 — full reverse grid

The grid reversed completely: Luhn on pole, Hoffmann last. Herbrig led briefly, but Grabowski was past him and Luhn inside the opening lap and led all 12. The first corner did the damage — a multi-car collision shoved Wuschnakowski into Chmielewski and tore the rear wing off David Hoffmann, whose race ended there (DSQ, zero laps). Chmielewski needed a 165-second repair, Herbrig collected a repair penalty and two black flags, and Wuschnakowski served a drive-through. Grabowski won by 12.07 s from Marcus Rothe (from P7), with Dominic Waack third. Bernhard Wlach finished fourth on a visibly broken sidepod, and Friedrich Luhn took a career-best fifth with a single incident point by staying out of all of it.

Round podium & championship

Add the sprints together and neither race winner tops the round: P1 Marcus Rothe 52 pts (P3 + P2), P2 Lucian Grabowski 51, P3 Dominic Waack 47, then Chmielewski 44, Wlach 42, Wuschnakowski 40, Luhn 38, Herbrig 33 and race-1 winner David Hoffmann last on 31.

Championship after Round 4 (CLS): P1 Lucian Grabowski 170 · P2 Kevin Chmielewski 140 · P3 Bernhard Wlach 115 · P4 Thomas Herbrig 112 · P5 Marcus Rothe 112 · P6 David Hoffmann 108 · P7 Andreas Wuschnakowski 106 · P8 Dominic Waack 96. The two who stayed home paid for it — Pascal Marx falls to P9 (85) and Eike Werner to P10 (80). Full per-race tables and the 2D replays are in the SFL Race Center.

Next round

Round 5 heads to Zolder (Alternate layout) on 19 August 2026. The postponed Round 3 at the Algarve closes the season on 14 October.

Narrative from the cas_sim_tv broadcast (Max Coldron, with David Hoffmann on comms). Classification, teams and championship points are from CAS League Scoring (CLS); grid, gaps, best laps and incident points from the official iRacing event result (subsession 87736844); charts and replays from the in-sim iRaceControl telemetry logs.

Setting

The Autodromo Internazionale del Mugello, in the Tuscan hills, is a fast, flowing Grand Prix circuit that rewards commitment through its sweeping esses. 13 drivers took the grid in identical SF Lights 324 single-seaters for Round 2 of the CAS Super Formula Lights Cup, on a dry track that climbed from 25 to 31 °C. Format: lone qualifying, then two 13-lap sprints — Race 1 from the grid, Race 2 on a top-10 reverse grid. Broadcast live on cas_sim_tv.

Qualifying

Pascal Marx took pole at 1:37.065, edging Lucian Grabowski (1:37.216) and David Hoffmann (1:37.328) — the top three covered by barely a quarter of a second.

Race 1 — standing start

Marx converted pole into his first win of the season, managing his tyres carefully in the heat while Grabowski (P2, +0.76 s) and Hoffmann (P3, fastest lap 1:36.816) shadowed him but never got into striking range. The best fights were further back, where Bernhard Wlach recovered from a weak start with long, fair duels. It was a cleaner, lower-overtake race than Fuji. Friedrich Luhn spun and Thomas Felix retired.

Race 2 — reverse grid

The reverse grid was decided at the first corner: a five-wide crash at Turn 1 collected four cars, with Marx an innocent victim after being rear-ended. From P9, Grabowski charged through to win and controlled it from the front. Kevin Chmielewski took P2, and Eike Werner passed Wlach around the outside for P3, leaving Bernhard Wlach P4 and Thomas Herbrig a fine P5. Marx recovered to P7 with the fastest lap (1:37.053). David Hoffmann crashed out and dropped from second to sixth in the championship.

Round podium & championship

Combined round podium (per CLS): P1 Lucian Grabowski, P2 Kevin Chmielewski, P3 Pascal Marx. Grabowski banked 58 points on the day.

Championship after Round 2 (CLS): P1 Lucian Grabowski 119 · P2 Kevin Chmielewski 96 · P3 Pascal Marx 85 · P4 Eike Werner 81 · P5 Thomas Herbrig 79 · P6 David Hoffmann 77 · P7 Bernhard Wlach 73. Full per-race tables and the 2D replays are in the SFL Race Center.

Next round

Round 3 heads to the Algarve International Circuit on 22 July 2026.

Narrative based on the cas_sim_tv broadcast. Classification and lap data are from the official iRacing result; championship points are from CAS League Scoring (CLS).

Setting

Round 3 took the WCT to Circuit Zandvoort in the dunes on the Dutch coast. The 4.259 km Grand Prix layout runs from the Tarzan hairpin through Gerlach, Hugenholtz and the Scheivlak to the banked Arie Luyendyk turn onto the main straight. It was dry and overcast, with the air at 19 °C. The format was as usual: open qualifying split into an AM and a Pro session, then a timed hour of racing — 39 laps — starting on 60 % fuel, which makes one stop necessary.

Twenty-two drivers started, 12 Pro and 10 AM, with a strength of field of 2450. Several regulars were missing. The most notable was Yannick Wonnenberg, who had won both of the first two rounds and arrived as Pro championship leader. Ricardo Still was also absent. Andreas commentated alone on cas_sim_tv.

Qualifying

Andreas Bastian took the AM session with a 1:32.139. That was quick enough for seventh on the combined grid, with Michael Endres the next AM car in ninth. In the Pro session Maurice Becker had already been fastest in practice. He worked his way down and took pole with a 1:31.276, 0.418 s clear of Dennis Richter. Alvin Frauenknecht (+0.486), Marius Becker (+0.545) and Elias Schleich (+0.587) completed the top five. The booth summed it up: „Wenn Maurice dabei ist, dann geht's hier richtig zur Sache.“ Andre Brechmann crashed during the session. Klaus Oberländer was caught in traffic and went off, and started 15th.

Race — the opening lap

Becker led cleanly through Tarzan and was 2.3 s clear after one lap. Behind him Tim Freudling, his REVORYX team-mate, jumped from sixth to second. The opening lap cost Dennis Richter everything. He had started second, and the telemetry logs a contact for him early in the race. He came round 22nd and last with part of the car missing. „Ja, damit hat Dennis Richter 19 Plätze verloren,“ said the booth, which was switching cameras at the time and never established how it happened.

The early laps also caught out several others. Gregor Micewski lost the rear of the Ferrari, and Benjamin Warnow hit the barrier after an aggressive kerb ride and dropped to the back. Thomas Kuebler, the AM championship leader, slid the rear early on and fell to 22nd: „Da kann man jetzt, glaube ich, nur noch Schadensbegrenzung betreiben.“ Dirk Bolte's McLaren lost its front, and he drove on without it until his stop.

Race — Becker out of reach

From there the race for the win was over. Becker added roughly half a second a lap: 5.3 s on lap 7, 7.6 s on lap 10 and 9.4 s on lap 12. He set the fastest lap of the race, a 1:31.604, on lap 9. „Na, wenn der Maurice das Ding nicht selbstständig versenkt, ist da wohl kein Halten.“ Frauenknecht passed Freudling for second around lap 11 and was the only driver to keep the gap from growing quickly. Behind them, Leon Klein was making his way through quietly: ninth after one lap and sixth by lap 5.

Race — the stops

The stop window ran from lap 17 to lap 23. Micewski, Krumpschmied and Bolte came in first, on lap 17. Endres, Bastian and Gessner followed on lap 21, the main wave on lap 22, and Becker himself on lap 23. The stationary times were tight, between 33.9 and 37.5 s. The exceptions were Bolte's 76.8 s, which included repairing the front, and Andy Weber's 74.8 s, which dropped him from tenth to twentieth. Nobody in the top six changed places in the pit lane. Becker came out with a 14.6 s lead and stretched it to the end.

Race — the fight for the podium

The real contest was for third. Marius Becker spent most of the race with Elias Schleich close behind: the two were within 1.5 s of each other for 27 laps. „Marius Becker flüchtet vor Elias Schleich, was ihm allerdings nicht wirklich gelingt.“ In the closing laps Marius went after Freudling for third. Freudling ran onto the grass on the outside and there was light contact, which the booth judged fair: „Aber alles in allem, das Überholmanöver war okay.“ Moments later Freudling nearly lost the car and Schleich got through as well. Maurice Becker won by 20.860 s from Frauenknecht, with Marius Becker third, Schleich fourth and Freudling fifth.

Klein brought the car home sixth. Behind him Richter completed the recovery of the night. He worked back from last, passing Brechmann on the inside of the banking, and with about ten minutes left went for Endres, braking much later in the slipstream. On air it looked clean: „Da geht er natürlich in den Windschatten hinein und zieht hier vorbei und bremst hier wesentlich später … Sieht man nicht oft, war schön.“ The drivers saw it differently in the Discord afterwards. Richter apologised for the lunge: „Sorry für den Dive, wollte noch unbedingt an P6 in meiner Klasse ran… War keine böse Absicht!“ Endres accepted it, though the move had left his car damaged: „Beim zweiten Versuch hat’s geklappt. Ich wollte eigentlich noch Leon unter Druck setzen, aber das war dann nicht mehr möglich. Und Schaden hatte ich auch noch. Passiert halt sowas. Dass es keine böse Absicht war, weiß ich ja.“ Late on he also passed his team-mate Klaus Oberländer, and finished eighth.

AM — Bastian ahead at the end

Michael Endres led AM for most of the evening in the Aston Martin, seventh overall, with Andreas Bastian right behind. The two spent 34 laps within 1.5 s of each other, the closest fight of the race, and touched once at Tarzan. With about ten minutes left Richter's lunge left Endres with a damaged car, and on the last laps Bastian got past to win the class from AM pole, seventh overall. Endres was second in class in ninth. Manfred Baar was third in tenth. Kuebler recovered from his early slide to finish seventh in AM, 17th overall, with 18 overtakes.

Notable incidents

• Dennis Richter — from second on the grid to last after an early contact; how it happened was not established on air. He recovered to eighth on 8 incident points. His late pass on Endres involved contact that damaged the Aston Martin. Richter apologised on Discord and Endres accepted that it was not deliberate.
• Benjamin Warnow — contact and a barrier hit early, then stopped on track; he finished 14th.
• Klaus Oberländer — running in the top twelve late on, he spun and had a heavy impact on the final lap. He was classified 19th, one lap down, on 9 incident points.
• Dirk Bolte — front damage on lap 1, a 76.8 s stop with repairs, and 22nd at the flag, a lap down.
• Andy Weber — a 74.8 s pit stop dropped him from tenth to twentieth. The broadcast gave no reason.
• Unlike the season opener, the log records no black flags, and the booth reported none.

Final classification — top 10 (overall)

P1 Maurice Becker (Porsche 911 GT3 R, pole, led all 39 laps, FL 1:31.604, 0 incident points) · P2 Alvin Frauenknecht (McLaren 720S, +20.860 s) · P3 Marius Becker (McLaren 720S, +31.785 s) · P4 Elias Schleich (Mercedes-AMG, +33.301 s) · P5 Tim Freudling (Mercedes-AMG, +37.867 s) · P6 Leon Klein (Mercedes-AMG, +51.760 s) · P7 Andreas Bastian (Porsche 911 GT3 R, +54.040 s, AM win) · P8 Dennis Richter (McLaren 720S, +54.210 s) · P9 Michael Endres (Aston Martin Vantage, +55.637 s) · P10 Manfred Baar (Ferrari 296, +58.663 s). Class winners: Pro Maurice Becker, AM Andreas Bastian. The full 22-car classification is in the Race Center.

Championship after Round 3

With Wonnenberg absent, the Pro lead changed hands. Leon Klein now leads on 90, from Gregor Micewski (86), Klaus Oberländer (82) and Wonnenberg (80, two starts). Maurice Becker is fifth on 78 after two starts, and Frauenknecht sixth on 76. The top six are covered by 14 points. In AM, Thomas Kuebler still leads on 108, with Florian Roessler and Andreas Bastian level on 104. Teams: REVORYX eSports 126, Speed Monkeys II 117, NEON Simsports Blue 108. Full tables below.

Notes from the booth

• Driver of the Day — Leon Klein (#16, SCHERER eSPORT, Pro): merit score 0.770, from 14th to sixth with 15 overtakes. The broadcast called his drive „unauffällig“.
• The interview room stayed empty after the flag, but the drivers talked on Discord instead. Frauenknecht: „Glückwunsch an Maurice, brutale Pace.“ He had not had much time to practise and was „selber überrascht, dass ich auf einer für mich neuen Strecke schnell zurecht gekommen bin.“ Becker: „Porsche hat wieder gut funktioniert.“ Brechmann: „Ich habe Alpträume von den McLaren-Fronten im Rückspiegel.“
• Alvin Frauenknecht (Melanzani Racing), last season’s Red Bull Ring winner, made only his second start of Season 14 and finished second.
• Elsewhere in CAS: the Combined Cup the next evening at VIR North in the BMW M2; the Porsche Community Cup at the Algarve on Thursday 8 October; the SFL finale the following week; and IEC Le Mans on 31 October, streamed by Thomas Herbrig. Once the PCCD season is over, Andreas and Thomas will take turns streaming the WCT rounds.
• Next WCT round: Round 4 at the Mobility Resort Motegi (Grand Prix), Tuesday 13 October.

The narrative is from the cas_sim_tv broadcast (Andreas) and the drivers’ posts in the CAS Discord after the race. The classification, the Pro/AM split, round points, championship tables and the Driver of the Day are from CAS League Scoring (CLS). Grids, gaps, best laps, laps led and incident points come from the iRacing event result (subsession 89169894). Pit stops, contacts and lap-by-lap gaps come from the in-sim iCASControl telemetry log. Where the broadcast could not establish who caused an incident, this report does not speculate.

Setting

Silverstone in Northamptonshire opened Season 14 — the 5.89 km Grand Prix layout with its eighteen corners, from Abbey and the Wellington Straight through Copse and the Maggotts–Becketts–Chapel sequence to Stowe and Club. The new season follows the official iRacing GT Sprint calendar one week behind, on Tuesdays, with the finale again a Monday Special Event; weaker weeks may be swapped for a track from the regional GT3 tours. Conditions were dry under a hazy sky, air 19 °C. Format as usual: split qualifying with AM first and Pro second, a timed hour of racing — 30 laps — on 60 % fuel, which makes one stop unavoidable.

Twenty-eight drivers started, 12 Pro and 16 AM. Last season’s AM champion Elias Schleich and AM runner-up Ricardo Still have been promoted to Pro. There is no Gentleman Driver class this year: with 36–37 registrations the league is short of the 45 it needs for a third class. Season 13 champion Mike Zocher was not on the grid. The regulations are unchanged in their essentials: three drop results; entries up to and including Round 9, after which the regulars are re-classified Pro/AM on their points average; one car for the whole season; mandatory series decals, with penalty points for missing decals from Round 2; teams of at most three drivers, the best two results counting. What is new: instead of trophies, the entry fees are paid out as prize money in iRacing dollars.

The broadcast itself had a rough start — the studio light would not switch on, OBS stuttered and several cars carried the wrong number on the overlay (a placeholder #999 among them). Andreas promised it would all be clean by Round 2.

Qualifying

The AM session went to Thomas Kuebler, whose 1:59.455 put him tenth on the combined grid, 0.066 s ahead of Andreas Bastian with Michael Endres the next AM car in thirteenth. Bernhard Wlach had announced he would carry the red lantern and did, from 28th.

In the Pro session Maurice Becker — already fastest in practice — took pole with a 1:58.174, 0.137 s clear of Yannick Wonnenberg. Gregor Micewski (+0.451), Becker’s new team-mate Tim Freudling (+0.520) and Schleich (+0.764) completed the top five. The whole 28-car field was covered by 3.641 s.

Race — the start

The opening lap was busy. Micewski went for it from third and spun on cold tyres — „Oh, es war zu viel des Guten. Der Gregor dreht sich hier weg … Kalte Reifen, sag ich nur.“ — and was sixteenth two laps later. Wonnenberg cut the track in the opening scramble, collected a slowdown and was sixth at the end of lap 2. Benjamin Warnow lost a part in contact, hit the barrier, dropped to the back and pitted on lap 1. Worst off was Mike Girenz, caught in a scrum in the start area, hit a second time and stopped on track; he never completed a lap and CLS lists him as DSQ. The broadcast did not establish who caused either contact, and this report names nobody.

Race — Becker hands one back, Freudling leads

Becker led the first three laps with Freudling second. Then, on laps 4–5, he dropped to fourth with no incident on the screen — the booth suspected a slowdown. The explanation came in the interview room: Becker had made contact with Wonnenberg at the start and let him back through. „Der Start war auch nicht sauber von mir … Aber ich wollte einfach fair bleiben und dann hinterher vorbeilassen.“ Wonnenberg admitted he had not noticed: „Ich dachte … okay, hatte vielleicht einen Slowdown. Aber ja okay, dann Respekt.“

That left Freudling in the lead, with Schleich second in his first Pro race. Wonnenberg set the fastest lap of the race, a 1:58.521 on lap 6, went past Schleich on lap 9 and Becker followed. From there it was a chase: 1.7 s on lap 10, 1.1 on lap 13, 0.8 on lap 15 and 0.19 s on lap 17. Freudling held on, and led 13 laps in all.

Race — the pit window decides it

All four front-runners pitted on lap 17. On the way in Freudling went over the grass, took a slowdown and gave up the places to Wonnenberg and Becker, and the stops ran in that order. The stationary times were long and close together — almost the whole field between 50.4 and 55.9 s, Andy Weber quickest; Michael Endres lost ten seconds more with a 65.6 s stop. Hubert Diethard and Andreas Bastian came in early, around lap 15; Klaus Oberländer and Thomas Kuebler stayed out a lap longer, which gave Oberländer one lap in the lead. Once he had stopped, Wonnenberg led every remaining lap to the flag.

Race — the run to the flag

Becker was 1.25 s behind after the stops and closed the gap steadily — 0.85 s on lap 23, 0.36 s on lap 25, 0.34 s on lap 27 — but never close enough to try a pass on Wonnenberg, whose defence the booth called clean. He had a reason to hold back: both he and Freudling were on 13 incident points. „Ich musste aufpassen. Ich hatte auch 13 … wenn du jetzt noch einmal Kontakt hast oder so, dann war es das für mich.“ Wonnenberg won by 0.821 s. Freudling brought his car home third, 10.2 s back: „Ich hatte schon 13, wo ich in die Box reingefahren bin. Und da dachte ich, ich verwalte einfach nur noch safe den dritten Platz.“ Schleich was a lonely fourth, Weber fifth.

The last fight in the top ten was for sixth. Micewski had recovered from sixteenth, passed Oberländer late on and was sixth at the start of the final lap — then went off and let Oberländer back through. Oberländer was classified sixth, Micewski seventh, 1.99 s apart.

AM — Kuebler from class pole

Thomas Kuebler won AM in eighth overall. He passed Bastian after the stops — Bastian had pitted three laps earlier — and finished 2.549 s ahead, with only five incident points all evening. Andreas Bastian was second in class after spending the pit phase fighting back from 23rd, and Michael Endres third, having beaten Andre Brechmann in a side-by-side fight. Dirk Bolte (P13 overall, from 21st), Florian Roessler and Fritz Morawetz completed the AM top six; Morawetz crashed the Mustang on his out-lap and kept going.

Notable incidents & penalties

• Mike Girenz — out in the start-area contact, 0 laps, DSQ on CLS without points. No steward note has been published.
• Benjamin Warnow — contact and a barrier hit on lap 1, a spin later, and two black flags; he finished the night on 26 incident points, the race high, a lap down in 26th.
• Andre Brechmann — a black flag that, by the booth’s reading, was for speeding in the pit lane and arrived after he had already come in; he then spent more than five minutes in the box, rejoined four laps down and collected a second black flag late on. Classified 27th.
• Ricardo Still — black-flagged for the incident total while running seventh in his first Pro race; 18 incident points and eleventh at the flag.
• Danny Platzer and Patrick Stummer — black flags in the final laps; the booth gave no cause for either.
• Leon Klein — ran wide over a kerb early in the race, crashed and dropped to 16th; recovered to twelfth.
• Manfred Baar and Danny Platzer — the two DanKüchen Ferraris both went over the kerbs and into the gravel.

Final classification — top 10 (overall)

P1 Yannick Wonnenberg (McLaren 720S, led 13 laps, FL 1:58.521) · P2 Maurice Becker (Porsche 911 GT3 R, pole, +0.821 s) · P3 Tim Freudling (Mercedes-AMG, led 13 laps, +10.246 s) · P4 Elias Schleich (Mercedes-AMG, +17.801 s) · P5 Andy Weber (Mercedes-AMG, +31.824 s) · P6 Klaus Oberländer (McLaren 720S, +37.220 s) · P7 Gregor Micewski (Ferrari 296, +39.213 s) · P8 Thomas Kuebler (Mercedes-AMG, +42.153 s, AM win) · P9 Andreas Bastian (Porsche 911 GT3 R, +44.702 s) · P10 Michael Endres (Aston Martin Vantage, +53.920 s). Class winners: Pro Yannick Wonnenberg, AM Thomas Kuebler. Full 28-car classification in the Race Center.

Championship after Round 1

Pro: Wonnenberg 40, Becker 38, Freudling 36, Schleich 34, Weber 32. AM: Kuebler 40, Bastian 38, Endres 36, Bolte 34, Roessler 32. Teams: Becker and Freudling’s newly founded REVORYX eSports lead on 64 from Speed Monkeys (35) and NEON Simsports Blue (34). Full tables below.

Notes from the booth

• Driver of the Day — Andreas Bastian (#921, NEON Simsports Blue, AM): merit score 0.818. Andreas had called Alexander Thieme „eindeutiger Kandidat auf Driver of the Day“ on air — the merit score put him second, ahead of Krumpschmied and Bolte.
• Wonnenberg on the new season: „Gucken wir erst mal, das Niveau wird stetig krasser hier.“
• Car numbers and decals — several numbers on the overlay were wrong at Silverstone; they are to be fixed by Round 2, when missing series decals start to cost a penalty point.
• Next up in the CAS calendar — the Combined Cup at the Nürburgring on Wednesday 23 September; the Porsche Community Cup at Zolder on Thursday 24 September; the SFL Cup on 30 September; IEC Round 2 at Fuji (no chicane) on 3 October; and an Advent series of four short fun races in December without an overall classification.
• Next WCT round: Round 2 at Road Atlanta (Full Course), Tuesday 29 September.

Narrative from the cas_sim_tv broadcast (Andreas). Classification, the Pro/AM split, round points and the Driver of the Day are from CAS League Scoring (CLS); grids, gaps, best laps, laps led and incident points from the iRacing event result (subsession 88830003); pit stops, black flags and lap-by-lap gaps from the in-sim iCASControl telemetry log. Where the broadcast could not establish who caused an incident, this report does not speculate.

Setting

The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on the Île Notre-Dame in Montreal — 4.36 km, fourteen corners, long straights joined by hard-braking chicanes, and the exit kerb of the last chicane that has been called the Wall of Champions since 1999. Round 12 was run on a Monday rather than the usual Tuesday, because the iRacing build update lands on the Tuesday after season week 12; that date sits outside the normal calendar, so the league picks the track freely and calls it the season’s Special Event. Commentator Andreas: „… und dann haben wir das auf Special Event getauft, weil die Strecke wird immer separat ausgewählt.“ Conditions were dry and clear, air around 21 °C and the surface about 24 °C. Format as usual for the WCT: split qualifying with AM first and Pro second, an hour of racing — 38 laps — and a single stop for fuel, which all twenty cars took.

Twenty drivers started, 13 Pro and 7 AM, with no GDC entry at all — against 33 at the Red Bull Ring a week earlier. It was the smallest field of the season and the booth said so plainly: drivers who can no longer move in the championship stay away, which is hard on the ones who have paid an entry fee and turned up. AM champion Elias Schleich, AM runner-up Benjamin Warnow and Red Bull Ring winner Alvin Frauenknecht were among the absentees.

Qualifying

The AM session came first and belonged to Manfred Baar. The Austrian worked his Ferrari down from a 1:36.4 to a 1:34.843 and put himself ninth on the combined grid — ahead of five Pro cars, and 0.15 s clear of the next AM runner, Michael Gessner. Ricardo Still was the next AM man at 1:34.997, with Thomas Kuebler, Robert Zellner and Danny Platzer behind. Christoph Kiesel had the worst of it: a deleted lap and then a crash in one of the chicanes left him twentieth and last.

The Pro session then produced the closest front row of the season. Yannick Wonnenberg went top with a 1:34.280 and Mike Zocher answered with a 1:34.274 — pole by six thousandths of a second. Lukas Zörlaut was third on 1:34.297, so 23 thousandths covered the first three cars; Maurice Becker, Marius Becker, Christian Hartl, Markus Groß and Dennis Richter filled the next five slots inside a further three tenths. The whole twenty-car field was covered by 2.413 s.

Race — the start, and Markus Groß’s first lap

Zocher held the lead into Virage Senna and crossed the line for the first time with Wonnenberg still glued to him — the gap after lap 1 was one thousandth of a second. Behind them the field got away cleanly, with one exception. Markus Groß was spun round after light contact on the run to the back of the circuit, dropped from seventh to last, and then spun a second time at the hairpin while trying to recover. The broadcast replayed it twice and could not establish who was responsible; Andreas floated a name and then withdrew it himself, so this report names nobody. Groß spent the next thirty laps climbing back to ninth.

The lap-one movers were Justin Christiansen, up from twelfth to sixth, and Mike Girenz, thirteenth to seventh — the start of the drive that would win him the Driver of the Day.

Race — the leader alone at the front

From that thousandth of a second the race at the front simply stopped being a race. Zocher was 1.25 s clear by lap 2, 4.1 s by lap 6 and 7.6 s by lap 20, and he never gave any of it back. He led all 38 laps, was never overtaken, and took the fastest lap of the race — a 1:34.374 on lap 37, when the result had long been settled. His own account afterwards was as undramatic as the drive: „Bin einfach mein Rennen gefahren, habe gar nicht weiter nach hinten großartig geschaut, sondern einfach konzentriert. Nicht irgendwo einplanken, keine Mauer touchieren.“

Race — Wonnenberg, Maurice Becker and the team-order question

The interesting question of the first half was second place. Maurice Becker shadowed Wonnenberg for twenty laps and twice sat close enough that the timing screen had them level on the gap to the leader — laps 8 and 12 — but he could never carry enough out of the last chicane to use the slipstream on the pit straight. The booth read Wonnenberg’s pace as deliberate, holding the queue up so his Speed Monkeys team-mate could escape at the front, and noted that this is allowed: „Team Taktik, was ja auch nicht verboten ist, solange alles hier fährt und nicht mit Blocken oder sonst irgendwas.“ After the flag Andreas was more careful about it — the lap times, he said, did not show anyone behind Wonnenberg actually being faster. The telemetry agrees: Wonnenberg’s best lap, a 1:34.445, was the second quickest of the race.

The point became moot on its own. Becker brushed a wall shortly after the stops, and although the car looked undamaged it was not: „Es war kein harter Einschlag, aber es hat doch schon eine halbe Sekunde ja jede Runde Zeit gekostet. Ich habe versucht, das Auto irgendwie ins Ziel zu bringen, sozusagen zu überleben.“ Zörlaut took third place off him on lap 28, Hartl followed, and Becker finished fifth.

Race — the pit window

Groß and Kiesel, both already out of position, came in first on lap 17. The rest of the field went in two waves: Wonnenberg, Zörlaut, Girenz, Still, Gessner and Gradwohl on lap 21, then Zocher, Maurice Becker, Hartl, Richter, Micewski and Zellner on lap 22. The stationary times were unusually uniform — the whole field between 42.8 and 46.9 s, with Richter (42.81 s) and Groß (42.85 s) quickest and the AM runners two to four seconds slower. Nothing changed hands in the pit lane, and Zocher came back out still leading by more than six seconds.

Race — the run to the flag

The last third settled into a procession with one live fight in it. Christian Hartl, sixth on the grid and only thirteenth-quickest through the opening laps, was the strongest of the chasing group after the stop and closed on Zörlaut lap after lap: 0.8 s apart with five laps left, 1.612 s apart at the flag, with the third step of the podium never quite in reach. Hartl’s 1:34.505 was the third fastest lap of the race. Further back, Mike Girenz held sixth from Ricardo Still by 1.713 s to the end — the closest finish of the evening.

Class wins and the midfield

Ricardo Still won AM in seventh overall, 8.3 s clear of Manfred Baar — who had out-qualified him and led the class early, but lost the position in the pit phase and never got back. Thomas Kuebler was third in class, twelfth overall, after the best scrap of the midfield: he and Gregor Micewski swapped places repeatedly over ten laps, entirely cleanly, before Micewski made it stick and took eleventh. Robert Zellner was fourth in AM, Christoph Kiesel fifth from last on the grid, Danny Platzer sixth and Hubert Diethard seventh. No GDC driver entered, so the class was not contested at Montreal.

Notable incidents & attrition

• Marius Becker (#14, Ford Mustang) — the worst evening of anyone. Two spins inside the first twenty minutes, then contact and a heavy hit on lap 12; he pitted for repairs, stayed in the box for over twenty minutes and then left the session after 13 laps. CLS classifies him DSQ; no steward note has been published, and this report does not speculate about the reason.
• Dennis Richter (#63) — contact with Justin Christiansen, who by the broadcast’s reading got a wobble over a kerb and struck him. Richter then went from wall to wall and wrecked the car, and finished the night on 16 incident points, the highest of the race, classified nineteenth after 28 laps. He was also carrying a black flag from earlier whose cause the booth could not explain.
• Justin Christiansen — sixth on lap 1, then an off, a spin and a repair stop of nearly three minutes on lap 23. Classified sixteenth, one lap down.
• Danny Platzer — a black flag and an 85-second second stop. Andreas assumed a pit-lane speeding penalty at the exit but said so as an assumption; it was not confirmed on air.
• Hubert Diethard — connection dropouts all evening, by his own account of unknown cause, and two runs of repeated short pit visits on laps 19 and 33. He finished eighteenth, three laps down but still classified. A brake failure was floated in the booth as an explanation for the late stop and was never established.
• Robert Gradwohl — over the kerbs and square into the barrier; the Ferrari was bent but carried him to fourteenth.
• Robert Zellner — three off-tracks and a spin in the closing minutes, and still fourth in AM.
• Christoph Kiesel — a crash in qualifying, then contact and a spin in the race; fifteenth, one lap down. The Mustang looked the most sensitive car of the field over Montreal’s kerbs.

Final classification — top 10 (overall)

P1 Mike Zocher (BMW M4 GT3 EVO, pole, led all 38 laps, FL 1:34.374) · P2 Yannick Wonnenberg (BMW M4, +9.802 s) · P3 Lukas Zörlaut (Ferrari 296, +15.555 s) · P4 Christian Hartl (BMW M4, +17.167 s, from P6) · P5 Maurice Becker (Porsche 911 GT3 R, +22.387 s) · P6 Mike Girenz (Porsche 911 GT3 R, +35.420 s, from P13) · P7 Ricardo Still (McLaren 720S, +37.133 s, AM win) · P8 Manfred Baar (Ferrari 296, +45.443 s) · P9 Markus Groß (Ferrari 296, +47.483 s, from last after lap 1) · P10 Michael Gessner (BMW M4, +53.956 s). Class winners: Pro Mike Zocher, AM Ricardo Still (P7); no GDC entry. Full 20-car classification in the Race Center.

Championship after Round 12 — Season 13 final

Pro — Mike Zocher, champion, 330 points. The win was worth only twelve points to his total, because with eleven rounds started his weakest counting result dropped out; it was still enough. Maurice Becker is second on 316 and Yannick Wonnenberg third on 310 from only eight starts, Markus Groß fourth on 306 and Lukas Zörlaut fifth on 298 — the top five inside 32 points over a twelve-round season.

AM — Elias Schleich, champion, 350 points, decided before Montreal and confirmed in his absence. Behind him the finale did change something: Ricardo Still’s class win lifted him past the absent Benjamin Warnow into second, 324 to 322. Christoph Kiesel is fourth on 284 and Thomas Kuebler fifth on 277.

Gentleman Driver Challenge — Markus Heinzl, champion, 245 points, from Michael Endres (205) and Björn Krumpschmied (174). With no GDC car entered at Montreal the table is unchanged from the Red Bull Ring.

Teams — Speed Monkeys, champions, 514 points. Zocher and Wonnenberg finished first and second in the finale and took the team title with it, from Neon Simsports Orange (366) and Speed Monkeys II (355).

Notes from the booth

• Driver of the Day — Mike Girenz (#33, FRAMIDI Racing, Pro): merit score 0.808 — thirteenth on the grid, sixth at the flag, nine overtakes and two incident points. The award, as CLS puts it, rewards the best drive through the field rather than the race winner.
• The standings are provisional. The three-day protest window runs to Thursday, and the remaining penalty points are deducted after it closes: „Wir warten jetzt natürlich noch diese drei Tage Protestzeit bis Donnerstag ab und dann werden auch die paar Pünktchen, die dann noch als Strafpunkte übrig bleiben, noch abgezogen.“ Final tables are expected in the middle of the week; trophies and the Gentleman Driver medals ship at the end of it, and drivers need to send their postal address by DM.
• The small finale field was the evening’s sore point. Twenty cars from a league with a waiting list, on a night when four championships were being closed out.
• Season 14 — registration is open with around 25 of the 50 slots taken. Tuesdays, twelve races, built on the iRacing GT3 Sprint calendar with the option of borrowing from the three regional GT3 tours where a week throws up an unpopular track; IMSA is ruled out because it needs an A licence. The Pro/AM split is still under review. A seeding event runs next Tuesday and the season proper starts a week later. The entry fee stays at 10 € for the twelve races and covers the trophies and their postage — „Wir wollen ja auch keinen Profit machen.“
• Next up in the CAS calendar — Porsche Community Cup at Donington on Thursday 10 September (2 × 25 minutes, top-eight reverse grid); the Combined Cup / SFL on Thursday 16 September; and IEC Round 2 at Fuji (no chicane) on 3 October, three hours. An Advent series of four fun races, without an overall classification, is planned for December.

Narrative from the cas_sim_tv broadcast (Andreas). Classification, the Pro/AM split, round points and the Driver of the Day are from CAS League Scoring (CLS); grids, gaps, best laps and incident points from the iRacing event result (subsession 88544343); pit stops, lap-by-lap gaps and the merit score from the in-sim iCASControl telemetry log. Where the broadcast could not establish who caused an incident, this report does not speculate.

The start — the concertina effect through the chicane

The replay made it obvious: by the time the leaders took the green flag, the back of the field had not even cleared the Allard chicane. Gaps of three or more car lengths ran through the whole rear half — partly the chicane’s fault, partly self-protection, because everyone behind feared sudden braking ahead. Two practical findings: from the cockpit the distances feel far closer than they are — most overlays show a gap readout, and around 3 m bumper-to-bumper is a safe formation distance worth calibrating against. And a structural fix was proposed for next season: race control announces a grid-formation point (e.g. mid-way down the preceding straight, or simply via a chat call “grid formation now”), from which everyone holds a fixed reduced pace — around 70–75 km/h was suggested — and tyre-weaving stops, since the weaving is what tears the gaps open. Two-wide through the chicane at that speed is no problem, and the back of the field finally gets a chance to close up before green. Many other leagues run exactly this; it goes into the improvement-proposals channel.

Lap 1 — a pit-entry mix-up and an optimistic dive

The first flashpoint came before Turn 1: one car ran far right along the pit wall — the driver later explained he believed he was heading into the pits — and contact followed. The replay’s onboard raised a second question: after the initial touch the steering stayed turned towards the other car instead of opening up. The room explicitly declined to assume intent — iRacing’s netcode can briefly “glue” two cars together in close contact — but the follow-up steering input was flagged as the avoidable part. Context mattered too: it was the first racing lap on a green, cold track that everyone agreed was more than slippery.

The second flashpoint was the chicane: a dive from very far back, braking at the 50-metre board with a lot of optimism. The subtlety from the replay: the diving car appeared to time its braking off a Porsche making the same move ahead — a move that worked for the Porsche — rather than off its own braking references, and the car behind it expected a two-wide entry, not a late lunge. Full braking from that depth also means understeer; the result was contact and scattered debris. The takeaway was less about blame than about lap-1 calibration: brake on your own marks, and don’t copy the braking point of a different car on different tyres.

The outside-line 50/50

Mid-race, a car on six-lap-fresher tyres went around the outside of a rival who had just left the pits on a cold set — the outside line being, at that corner, essentially the racing line. The inside car had little room left to give under the rules; the outside car carried the speed advantage but also all the classic outside-line risk: the inside car’s understeer was always going to come, and it did. The room’s verdict was a clean 50/50 racing incident — both could have backed out, neither did. The strategic point for an hour-long race: with a big tyre delta, shorting the corner and re-passing with the slipstream into the chicane is often the cheaper move than committing around the outside against a car on cold rubber.

Full speed into the pit-entry queue

A separate incident at the pit entry: a car slowed early through the final chicane to position its pit-in — staying as far right as it could — and the car behind held full speed onto it. The room’s read: everyone knows where the pit entry is and that cars will be slowing there; running flat into that zone is your own risk, and in this case the offending car effectively penalised itself with the damage it took.

Paper cars — damage after the latest patch

One driver finished the race with a bent steering column and a missing splitter after a contact that looked harmless — “the cars are made of paper since the last patch” was the room’s shorthand. The instructive part: the other driver involved never realised the car was wounded. He saw the missing splitter but read the slow pace as a fuel-saving problem — and iRacing’s own contact report claimed no damage at all. The lesson cuts both ways: after any contact, assume the other car may be crippled even if it looks intact, and don’t trust the “0x” in the contact log.

Lapping etiquette — both sides of the blue flag

The most constructive thread of the night. A driver from the slower end of the field described the stress of being hustled mid-corner while already fighting a difficult car on dead tyres: “I’m happy to lift on the straight and let anyone by — but once I’m committed to a corner, I can’t dissolve into thin air.” The faster drivers’ answer was unanimous and practical: the easiest car to lap is one that stays on the racing line and simply lifts where it’s safe — because the line is the one place the approaching car can predict. Well-meant moves off the line to make room are exactly what faster drivers cannot anticipate; one driver recalled nearly wrecking someone years ago doing precisely that. A counter-example from a previous round was raised — a backmarker inserting himself into a 0.3-second fight he had no stake in, nearly collecting a third car — against a positive one from this race: a clearly faster car arriving on a three-way scrap and simply waiting it out. Context decides: early in a race a re-pass attempt is fair game; deep in the field with nothing to gain, patience costs nothing and protects someone else’s race.

Car talk — the Ferrari is a pair of pliers

Two drivers are testing the Ferrari 296 ahead of a possible switch next season, and the verdict so far is affectionate but wary: “a real Giftzange” — sharp, direct, and merciless. It wants calm inputs and one very specific skill: hitting the brake at exactly the right spot and trailing exactly the right percentage into the corner. Get it right and the front end loads up beautifully; let it start sliding and “everything turns to mush” over all four tyres at once. The counter-intuitive trick of the week: where a lift makes it slide wide, holding part-throttle — just over half — pulls it back into line, because lifting drags the rear tyres through engine braking. The Mustang, by contrast, was praised as thoroughly good-natured; and for the smooth-input drivers in the field, the room reckoned the Ferrari might be the faster home.

Summary of the community post-race briefing following CAS GT3 WCT Season 12, Round 11 at Thruxton. Race facts cross-checked against the CAS League Scoring (CLS) classification; some incidents may still be under review.