Gordon Barnes successfully retained his Club Challenge championship title for a second time after he dominated his opposition on the opening day of EuroNASCAR Finals.
Gordon Barnes has become the first ever three-time champion in EuroNASCAR Club Challenge after the Brit scored a highly commanding victory in the season finale at Circuit Zolder.
With double points on the line, there’s an added incentive for drivers to perform at their maximum. Rain also persisted throughout the opening day of the EuroNASCAR Finals, which made the track significantly more challenging to drive.
Neither the pressure from double points nor the wet weather bothered the Marko Stipp Motorsport driver though, as he showcased why he is the driver to beat in EuroNASCAR’s regularity-based division.
Barnes made one perfect lap after another, allowing him to win both timed sessions. Such was his consistency that he only collected a grand total of 0.63 seconds of time penalty, a very miniscule amount considering that drivers in Club Challenge have to match their chosen target time as much as possible.
“It’s just great and we came here with double points on the line and tight championship standings,” said Barnes to euronascar.com. “The sessions today were difficult with the changing weather conditions and we’ve been really tested in the cars today.”
“It was just our day today, it was just brilliant. There was no better way to finish another amazing season. I’m a three-time Club Challenge winner now and I’m absolutely happy. Thanks to my team Marko Stipp Motorsport for the great job!”
Barnes finished the 2023 season with a 33 point lead from SpeedHouse Racing’s Florian Richard, who took second place at Zolder. The French rookie traded positions with his more experienced teammate Alain Mosqueron in the two sessions, but Richard finished higher because of a better penalty time on their highest result: 0.532 seconds to Mosqueron’s 2.089.
Federico Monti finished fourth ahead of his scheduled EuroNASCAR 2 debut with his team Academy Motorsport. He beat Club Challenge debutant Frédéric Rouvière, who took part in Team Japan Needs24’s No. 74 Toyota Camry. Team Japan’s car was borrowed by their technical partner RDV Competition.
Club Challenge regulars Arianna Casoli and Edouard Fatio finished sixth and seventh ahead of Viktor Schiffer, who screwed himself out of a strong result by choosing the faster reference time and only managing to get within 9 seconds of said time in the first session.
The classifications were completed by Dutch entrepreneur Reza Sardeha and ADAC GT driver Constantin Schöll, both also making their debuts in Club Challenge this week. Sardeha raced CAAL Racing’s No. 88 Chevrolet while Schöll took part in Bremotion’s No. 99 Chevrolet.
As always, drivers from both EuroNASCAR PRO and EuroNASCAR 2 also entered the Club Challenge sessions to get some extra practice time. It should be noted that with the changing weather conditions, the times set on Thursday are not going to be a good representative of their actual race pace.
Despite this, results that are recorded by timeservice.nl showed Sebastiaan Bleekemolen as the fastest driver of the day with a time of 1:46.182, 1.495 seconds faster than Jack Davidson.
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