NASA Great Lakes’ Zach Hillman had largely owned the GTS2 field all weekend, scoring 100 points on Friday and Saturday. The 2015 GTS2 Champion and third-place finisher in 2014, Hillman had his work cut out for him with NASA Northeast’s Michael Sousa starting from second and Zach Arnold from the Great Lakes Region on his heels in third.
At the green, Hillman took advantage of his starting position and led the field for the first six laps till a double-yellow came out and bunched up the field for several laps. Behind Hillman, Arnold had advanced to second place, with Matthew Wasilewski in third.
Once the mess was cleaned up, it was four laps of green-flag racing. By that point, the entire GTS field had bunched up, and traffic was intense. Wasilewski looked as though he might finish off the podium, but he dug deep and got it done.
“I had a poor restart and actually got passed by Sousa, but I was able to squeeze him out by Turn 1 maybe about two laps after we went back to green,” Wasilewski said. “Then I was able to catch up to Zach Arnold and we were bump-drafting each other, Mike Sousa, myself and Zach Arnold and it was probably the closest racing I’ve ever been a part of, so it went great. Then Arnold and I were side by side at the finish line.”
Just a few feet ahead of Wasilewski, Arnold finished second in GTS2.
“The caution helped us catch up, but then the traffic didn’t do me any favors,” Arnold said. “I was trying to hold off Matt the whole time, so overall it was a good race. We had good fun.”
By a margin of nearly 8 seconds, Hillman took home another GTS2 Championship.
“It’s really kind of where were hoping to be and we did our homework this year, and did what we did last year,” Hillman said. “I’ve got to give a lot of thanks to my dad. He’s a four-time Champion. This is my second one. We really just sort of went back to basics this year and we didn’t really work on the car that much this weekend, or do anything fancy. We did what we do.”
