iRacing and PAX Arena eSports hosted a first event of its kind, the $10K Almost Pro Open! This is the first edition of the series which gathers the top 40 qualifiers of the official time trial and puts them head to head in over $10K dollars in prizes! The top 8 from both heat races and the LCQ will be sent to battle it out in the main event live on the official iRacing live stream.
For this event I believe I qualified around 12th of 40 drivers in the time trial and was invited to come race. Unfortunately for me, I had some crazy hours at work that week and got absolutely ZERO practice until the official session was hosted. So, I hopped in the practice with names like Racim Fezoui, Brian Lockwood, and Casey Kirwan and posted a 11th fastest lap time; not bad!
Qualifying came around and I ran some amazing laps, posting what would have been a top 10 qualifying spot, but unfortunately the curbs on the backstraight chicane gave me a ghost Contact-0x and invalidated my laptimes. So I saw myself starting almost dead last for the first heat race.
Race #1 kicked off and I luckily managed to make it through the first lap without any incidents, picking up a few free positions from other driver’s incidents. On around the 12th minute I luckily avoided what could’ve been disaster with two cars crashing in the chicane and blocking the racing line on the exit. I went on to finish just outside the transfer spot in 9th place and would be pushed into the LCQ.
After heat 2 finished up, I found myself starting P3 for the LCQ. All I had to do was put in some good laps and not get caught up in any incidents. Here at Charlotte, the draft is king and one small mistake would see the cars behind me gaining a huge advantage for the next portion of the track. The green flag dropped and I got a great start, holding my position the first few laps. I did have some close battles with the P4 car but we decided to keep it clean as we were both in a transfer spot well ahead of the P5 car outside of the transfer spot. It was mostly an uneventful race and I went on to cross the line in P3 and made it to the main event.
For the main event I started 2nd to last (again) and raced in to turn one. To my surprise there was no pile up in turn 1 and I thought I had zero chance of making a good result. On the third lap I got my wish and around 5-6 of the top 15 drivers had a huge pileup in turn one. I passed on through and after a few passes later, was up in to P11! I would go on to race much of the main event by myself, trying to chase down the P10 car the final few laps but was unsuccessful as time ran out.
Over all I was happy with P11 considering I had very minimal practice (all of 30 minutes) and would walk away with some cool prizes from Intel and iRacing! I am looking forward to hopefully making it to the next one!