TCR / 13 May 2024
Four wins for Civic Type R TCR on dominant weekend
Four victories - including one for JAS Motorsport Development Driver Ignacio Montenegro - three pole positions and a glut of class wins made for an ultra-successful weekend for Honda Civic Type R TCR customer teams globally.
TCR Spain
JAS Development Driver Ignacio Montenegro made a superb start to the season at Jarama as he won the final race of the weekend.
The ALM Motorsport Driver, who already has the TCR Spain Winter Series to his name this year, started second on the partially-reversed grid, snatched the lead halfway around the first lap and sprinted clear, adding to his fifth spot in Race One.
Team-mate Alvaro Garcia was fourth in both races; his opening-race result also putting him on the Junior class podium. Sven Karuse scored a best result of 11th in Race One.
TCR Denmark
Hondas produced a clean sweep of all the races at Jyllands-Ringen with rookie Malte Ebdrup scoring his first series win in the finale for Mascot Motorsport with RaceGroup plus an Under-25s class double.
Ebdrup's team-mate Kasper H Jensen, who is aiming for a fifth-straight title, made it back-to-back pole positions on Saturday and won the opening race before adding second and third-place finishes later on.
Not even that was enough to keep him ahead in the Drivers' Championship though; TPR Motorsport's Mike Halder taking a win, two seconds and six key bonus points for setting fastest lap in all three races to edge ahead in the title race.
Halder's TPR team-mate Rene Povlsen won the Trophy class in all three races as he built his lead in the category for gentleman drivers. RaceGroup and Honda head the Teams' and Constructors' Championships.
Gustav Birch (RaceGroup), Philip Lindberg (PL Racing) and Jacob Wunderov (Wunderov Motorsport) scored best results of fifth, sixth and eighth respectively while Kim Konig (Team Bundgas) was second in Trophy in all three races.
TCR China
Martin Xie put MacPro Racing Team on pole position for the season-opener at Zhuzhou in a dry qualifying session, but was unable to turn that into victory in torrential rain on Saturday as he fell to sixth by the finish.
From eighth on Sunday's partially-reversed grid, he finished third. Team-mate Henry Ho was 10th twice - Sunday's result coming after recovering from stalling at the start - while Spark Racing's Yun Jie Zhou was eighth and 13th.
Norris Racing pair Chun Leung Chan and Tony Chan and Evolve Racing's Siu Min Man recorded best finishes of 13th, 14th and 16th respectively.
IMPC
Montreal Motorsport Group claimed their first TCR pole position in the series with a superb qualifying effort by Bryan Ortiz at Laguna Seca.
Ortiz led the opening half of the two-hour race, but co-driver Louis-Philippe Montour was beaten out of the pits by two key rivals and later suffered damage as a result of contact that forced him into the pits and pushed him back to 10th by the finish.
The sister car of Dai Yoshihara and Karl Wittmer was on course for fourth spot before being hit by a rival and dropping to sixth.
Coppa Italia Turismo
MM Motorsport fielded a single-car entry for Tony Verhulst at round two of the series at Varano and the Belgian racer qualified second in the TCR category aboard his FK7 Civic for Sunday's opening race.
Running comfortably in the runner-up spot, an incident at half-distance put him out and left his car too badly-damaged to contest Race Two.
IMSA
Gradient Racing endured a challenging weekend with the NSX GT3 Evo 22 at Laguna Seca as drivers Sheena Monk and Stevan McAleer sought to build on their season's-best fourth place in the previous race on the streets of Long Beach.
Having run inside the GTD class top five in practice, Monk qualified the car 13th and reached the edge of the top 10 by the time her 40-minute minimum drive-time had elapsed on race day.
McAleer took over for the final two hours and made up one place before being given a drive-through penalty for contact that dropped him to 12th with 30 minutes to go.
