The last leg of the Russian Endurance Challenge-2022 was held on Sunday 23 October in Sochi Autodrom. It was a four hour showdown between 19 crews in five classes – CN Pro, CN, GT Pro, GT, GT light. The main intrigue in the “absolute” was reduced to the battle between the prototype of the G-Drive Racing team (CN Pro class) and the Mercedes AMG GT3 of the Yadro Motorsport team (GT Pro class).
Pole position was taken by crew No. 26 of Roman Rusinov and Sergey Afanasyev, but already in the first meters of the distance Sergey Stolyarov in a Mercedes (crew 48) took the lead, with an advantage on the straights due to the high engine power. In the first half hour of the marathon, all attention was focused on the fight between Stolyarov and Rusinov. G-Drive Racing decided to beat their rivals due to an earlier pit stop – Rusinov took advantage of the lack of traffic on the track and increased the pace.
Stolyarov, on the other hand, began to overtake the circular and lose time overtaking slower cars. After the Mercedes pit stop, Yadro Motorsport returned to the track behind the G-Drive G01 prototype. In the course of the second segment, Rusinov strengthened his leadership – but the efforts were negated by the appearance of a safety car due to a fire on Mazda 3 (Valery Smirnov, crew No. 53).
Then Mercedes started to cut the generator and G-Drive Racing made a mistake on the second pit stop, releasing the car before the regulated 4 minute limit. For the violation, Afanasiev, who replaced Rusinov, was given a passage through the pit lane. But the Yadro Motorsport crew received a similar penalty for overtaking under yellow flags. And then Stolyarov and his teammate Viktor Shaitar dropped out of the battle for absolute leadership due to technical difficulties. On the final lap, the car froze on the track, but still managed to finish first in the GT Pro class.
The first position in the “absolute” was confidently held to the end by Rusinov and Afanasiev. Meanwhile, the crew of Rusinov and Afanasyev held the lead in the “absolute” and became the best in the CN Pro prototype class.
Together with Rusinov and Afanasiev, representatives of two crews of the Art Line team, participating in Legends-Evo cars, climbed the CN Pro podium. And in GT Pro, the top three winners were added by the crew of 23 from the Spora GT team on Porsche (Alexey Dudukalo, Evgeny Rumyantsev, Anton Devyakovich) and the crew of 71 from the KTM Racing Team Russia (Andrey Goncharov, Alexander Maslennikov ). And on the KTM X-Bow, literally half an hour before the finish, the engine caught fire, which didn’t stop the team from taking third in class.
In the GT class, the pilots of the Spora GT teams (crew 41) first fought beautifully on the Toyota Supra and APRTeam on the BMW M4 GT4 (crew 98), but then the BMW crew (Marat Khairov and Oleg Semenov) succeeded managed to take the initiative and lay a fairly solid foundation. Shortly before the finish, however, both teams had problems and solved them faster in the Spora GT pits, which predetermined the outcome of the race in favor of Toyota (Alexander Vartanyan, Stanislav Aksenov, Titarenko Sergey). Third place in class was won by the Shonx GT4 team (crew 28).
In GT Light, the race started with a great rivalry between foreign cars and the VAZ 21053 of the RK-Sport team, including Arkady Tsaregradtsev, champion of the Russian drift championship, in Sochi. The “combat classic” was in no way inferior to its rivals on the Mazda 3 and BMW E92. However, due to a number of circumstances, the pilots on the “Lada” were still unable to stay ahead. The win in this class was celebrated by Mazda Karting Academy’s Ilya Obzhigalov and Aslan Shirinov (crew 77). The second place was taken by the crew of 92 ClassicCarRacing teams and RK-Sport won the bronze.
In the numerous CN class, Shortcut consisted of Mitjet 2L teams. And the crew of one of these cars won a confident victory: Sergey Borisov and Nadezhda Yakhnich (crew 81, Yakhnich Drive) confidently spent the whole race, rightly climbing to the top of the podium. The top three winners were completed by the Balchug Racing Team (crew 21, Mikhail Loboda and Kirill Kirakozov) and Zub&Ko (crew 9, Vitaly Zubenko and Konstantin Zakharevsky).
- The Russian REC series returns next year. But we won’t see any Russian KAMAZ trucks at the Dakar rally raid next January.
- “Behind the Wheel” can be seen on RuTube.
The season of a spectacular racing series has ended at Sochi Autodrom – the end of the season turned out to be interesting!
