Mike Mallais had scored pole position in GTS1 by scoring 100 points on Friday and 100 more on Saturday, so he was looking good for Sunday’s Championship bout. Jean-Pierre Verbunt started from second with 944 Spec racer Jason Stanley double-dipping and starting from third.
When the green dropped, Mallais took off and gapped the field, leading the way for several laps until a full-course caution slowed the field to a crawl. When the race resumed, Mallais had dropped out with a mechanical, leaving Verbunt in first place, with Stanley in second and NASA Southeast’s Larry Helm in third.
Like all the other classes in race group A, the yellow flags disappeared and left four laps of intense racing in heavy traffic. Verbunt took the checkered flag first, but he was DQ’d after the race. That put Stanley in first.
“My plan was just to manage traffic and keep the first and second-place guys in sight as much as possible,” Stanley said. “On the last lap, somebody went through the Bus Stop in the dirt and completely dusted out the outer esses. The eventual winner essentially stopped because he couldn’t see through it and that allowed me to catch up to him. I decided I was going to downshift into third and go around the inside and hope for the best. I got in front of him and then he got me back in the toe of the boot coming up the hill just because in a spec car I’m 200 pounds overweight.”
With Stanley in sight, Helm brought home what he thought was third place, but was actually a second.
“We’ve got some good competitors out there, so everybody was pretty well matched with the exception of Mike Mallais, who evidently had a car problem and dropped out,” Helm said. “The rest of us kind of hung in there, one, two, three, fairly close. Keeping up with Jason is what I was trying to do.”
As a result of the DQ, John Mock finished third.
