Roberto Crescencio had been driving like a champion all weekend. He scored the fastest time in qualifying and took the win in a crash-shortened qualifying race on Saturday. For Sunday’s race, Crescencio had a little something up his sleeve, but he wouldn’t say what it was.
At the green flag, Crescencio got to Turn 1 first, but he didn’t appear to have any huge advantages. However, 15 minutes into the race, Crescencio had established a 10-second gap between himself and Jeff McGuiness. Crescencio had kept the setup on the car, but decided to swap his front windshield for a Lexan windshield. The change proved to be beneficial over the course of the race, which ended on red-flag conditions.
“I put it on for today only,” Crescencio said of the windshield. “I guess it’s not a secret anymore.”
Crescencio’s victory on Sunday was redemption for last year at the 2017 Eastern States Championships where he fell short of a championship.
Jeff McGuiness held up his end of the bargain to take second in GTS3.
“It was a great race. I had a ton of fun. I got jumped on the start. I didn’t have that great of a start but it ended up OK for me,” McGuiness said. We didn’t start hitting traffic till maybe three quarters of the way through the race. Then it did help a little bit, but other than that it was pretty clean race for the most part.”
Tyler Clarke, who also traveled with a group of 10 drivers from the Seattle area — McGuiness included — to take third in GTS3. McGuiness’ fastest lap time was just .002 seconds quicker than Clarke.
“We got down here on Tuesday night and we got to test out the track on Wednesday and Thursday before we got a little weather on Friday, but it was a great weekend,” Clarke said. “It’s a fun track. It’s the first time to Austin for me and first time at this track. It’s really cool to be on a Formula 1 track. That’s something that not a lot of people get to say they raced on.”
