TCR / 22 September 2025
Civic Type R scores 50th win of 2025 on ultra-successful weekend
The Honda Civic Type R TCR scored his 50th race win of the 2025 season on a weekend when JAS Motorsport-built racing cars achieved success in both touring car and GT competition across the globe.
TCR Spain
Michael Markussen scored his first series victory with a well-judged drive in Race Two at Jerez on Sunday as the Dane’s Markussen Racing Civic Type R TCR led a clean sweep of the podium for Honda machinery.
Passing the Auto Club RC2 Valles Civic of Victor Fernadez at the end of the first lap, Markussen initially held off the advances of ALM Motorsport’s Sten-Dorian Piirimagi and later of TPR Motorsport’s Mike Halder as he took the chequered flag.
Halder had qualified on pole position and won the opening race – which was the 50th win of the year for the Civic Type R TCR and the 11th for the German driver, who left Jerez with an increased championship lead with one round to go.
RC2’s Felipe Fernandez completed the podium in third while Piirimagi slipped to sixth. Victor Fernandez won the Master class to close on series leader Rene Povlsen as the TPR driver – who had won Race One – did not finish.
ALM’s Sven Karuse was second and fourth in class while team-mate Demir Eroge was sixth in Race One.
IMPC
Montreal Motorsport Group duo Karl Wittmer and Louis Philippe Montour snatched the TCR points lead with a last-gasp podium finish at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Montour qualified the Civic Type R TCR third in class and moved into the lead within the first 15 minutes of the two-hour race, but fell to the rear of the top five as the timing of two safety-car periods prompted several divergent strategies.
Battling back, Wittmer stole third place on the penultimate lap, enough to give he and Montour a 10-point lead with 350 available at the Road Atlanta finale.
William Tally and Tim Lewis Jr qualified a season’s-best eighth and finished fifth for KMW Motorsports with TMR Engineering while HART’s Chad Gilsinger and Tyler Chambers were running fourth when punted into a spin by a GT4 car. They finished ninth.
TCR China
MacPro Racing Team scored their first win of the season as recent team returnee David Deng triumphed at Shanghai, taking advantage when the race leaders collided at mid-distance and sprinting into a lead he would not lose.
He added second place in the Am class on Sunday while Norris Racing’s Siu Ming Man was fourth in both races, his team-mate Tony Chan finishing on his tail in Race One.
Spark Racing’s Yunjie Zhou and MacPro’s Zhu Cheng took best results of sixth and eighth while Team TRC’s James Tang did not finish either race.
TCR China Challenge
Unusually the Challenge races were held within the TCR China main series encounters, and resulted in a maiden series win for Team TRC’s William Cheung, who led Spark Racing’s Jerry Sun and TRC’s Euan Chan in an all-Honda podium in Race Two.
Sun and Cheung had been second and fourth in Saturday’s opener while Chan retired at half-distance while lying second.
Thai Super Series
Piti Bhirombhakdi and Kantasak Kusiri’s second victory of the season at Sepang, Malaysia, maintained their challenge for a second-straight title in the Supercar GT3 division.
From a front-row start in Saturday’s opening race, Bhirombhakdi slid back to fifth spot as the lights went out, but a late-braking move for the first corner took his Singha Motorsport Team Thailand Honda NSX GT3 Evo up to second place instantly.
A handful of laps later he moved into a lead he would not lose as Kusiri took over at the mid-race pitstops and recorded a 15-second victory.
That win meant that the pair would carry the maximum success handicap into Sunday’s race, which Kusiri started from pole position and led initially. The handicap time incurred at the pitstop removed their hopes of a double win and they finished third.
They are second in the standings but know that a double victory at the Buriram finale would guarantee another title.
Italian Hillclimb Championship
Nicola Sinigaglia scored another podium finish in the TCR division in what was the 41st running of the Pedavena-Croce D’Aune run in North-East Italy. Sinigaglia had previously won the category at the Verzegnis-Sella Chianzutan event in June.
