The bright yellow #7 car of Aaron Smith II won the second found of the VRX-Pimax World Cup, at Charlotte Speedway. The opening race saw most laps being lead by Chris Caroll, but repetitive cautions toward the end shook up the order. The race finished under yellow, with Smith II taking the checkers.
Aaron Smith II: “Jonathan Schwartz who finished second: “It’s a pity we couldn’t race in the last laps. It was unfortunate, I wanted to give it a shot, but Aaron also looked really strong on the restarts. I was so upset earlier in the race, when Jseph came on the track and slammed me. and I thought my race was over, I overshot my pit, and barely made it back to the pits with my damage. I don’t know how I overtook so many people on the outside, but that was super fun. And I avoided that wreck out of two, and I escaped into second. I really enjoy Charlotte and am super happy to get a podium here.
I know that Aaron is really a good driver on road courses I’m looking forward to Watkins Glenn, but with a lot of tracks with lots of banking, I feel it’s really hard to tell who’s going to win it (the championship). But I’m happy with the result and hope I can get the momentum going.
Sean Boundy in third place: “I’m a bit neutral with the race finishing under caution. I don’t think I had anything on Aaron, this time I thought I had warmed up enough and maybe ready to fight for second place. But if I got caught up in a wreck I’m much worse off. So I’ll take this solid third-place finish. The challenging part was to hold the pace that Chris did at the beginning of the race, but I felt my tires bailing on me. It was really a thing of when are they going to go, when are the cool tires going to go off? So I wondered if we were going to have a lot of green running at the front so I dropped back, maybe a bit too much. After that, I just got a reasonable position back and held the position. And then in the middle of the race, there was lots of tire wear which made it easy. And then the cautions came and it became irrelevant. It really depended on who saved better. You could only assume you calculated right. But I could have also blown off the tires and ended up worse. The caution just ruined the chance to see what happened. I‘m looking forward to Atlanta and all the tracks. They’re all a bit different but within range of the leaders, so great competition, and looking forward to it. Maybe looking forward to Watkins Glenn, the road course.”
And the winner, Aaron Smith II: “Yeah not sure where he came from (Chris Caroll), he showed a good speed and has solid iRating. And If anyone got around me at the restart I wouldn’t have come around them anymore but it worked in my favor. I was a little worried because I wasn’t so good on the restart, but I didn’t want to restart in first gear. But fortunately I was able to jump ahead each time in turns 1 & 2. But I’m glad it didn’t restart in the end. Now we go to Atlanta, I’m not sure what we expect. I try to keep all four corners of the car clean and look forward to the next one. I want to thank all the folks here, VRX and Pimax. See you next week.”