Jose Suero’s Honda S2000 developed a severe vibration about four laps before the finish and Suero wondered if his dream of a championship would vanish. A crash elsewhere on the course allowed Suero to finish under a yellow flag and secure his first championship.
“It was a dream for us,” Suero said. “Since we started with NASA Northeast racing in autocross to come here and get a championship is awesome. It’s what you think about when you come racing.”
Suero said the rear end started to have issues in the middle of the 25-lap race but he was able to keep some distance on Kevin Helms, who finished second. The rumble grew more severe as the race continued and eventually Suero had to back off the gas and that allowed Helms to draw closer, but Suero won with about 2 seconds separating the cars in a race shortened slightly by a crash on the white-flag lap.
Racing the only Honda Civic EK in a field of S2000s, Kevin Helms finished second. Helms has an H1 Championship to his credit, from 2015 at Virginia International Raceway.
“We didn’t have Jose’s pace today. It took a little while to get the car handling a lot better,” Helms said. “But we did better in that race and picked up a little bit more time, but we’ve been on the couch for a little while, so this was cool to come back. We did all of our races in one weekend to qualify. So I hadn’t raced for quite some time, so I’m pretty stoked about second place, for sure.”
Driving an S2000, Matthew Briddell finished in third place, the same position he took in 2015 at Virginia International Raceway when Helms won the Championship.
“Well, there was a lot of (traffic) coming from behind, passing me,” Briddell said. “So, I spent a lot of time trying to keep up with those guys and run a clean race, but basically make sure that the GTS crowd got around me safely. And for the most part they did, at least with H1.”
