Rob Huff wins dramatic season finale in Macau
Rob Huff has taken his second win of the season, and a record sixth at the Guia circuit at Macau, in a race which was twice red flagged, with less than half the field finishing the race, of which only nine were of the year’s regular competitors.
Tom Coronel made a great start from pole in the ROAL Motorsport BMW, while James Nash was able to move into second position, chasing second in the standings which could be his if he could win the race with Honda’s Gabriele Tarquini starting from the pit lane. Rob Huff made his way from seventh to third in his Münnich Motorsport SEAT at what was just the first attempt at a start.
Into Turn 1 however, there was carnage as Norbert Michelisz’s Zengo Honda was clipped while running three-wide on the inside of the corner, and speared across to the right, spinning across the track which saw several cars damaged in the ensuing chaos.
Out of the race was Tom Boardman, Mehdi Bennani, Hugo Valente, Konstantins Calko, Mikhail Kozlovskiy and Darryl O’Young.
The race was restarted behind the safety car in the original grid order, with Coronel again holding the lead ahead of Thompson as the safety car pulled in on lap three. RML’s Yvan Muller and Honda’s Tiago Monteiro came together at San Francisco, with Muller hitting the wall but able to continue, but Monteiro returned to the pits and was out of the race.
On lap four, Coronel was under threat from the Lada of James Thompson for the lead, who was forced to switch to defend into Lisboa from the Chevrolets of Tom Chilton and James Nash, with Nash running into the back of Chilton’s car, unsettling the pair of them and allowing Rob Huff to briefly move up into fourth position.
The following lap, Tom Chilton began to slow out of third with an engine problem, caused from damage . While he was crawling through Maternity, he was hit by Eurico De Jesus’s Honda Accord, which saw the safety car brought out.
Unfortunately the incident was far from over, as the next lap when the field came through they were barely able to navigate past the two cars and blocked the track. Most cars managed to come to a stop, but the China Dragon Racing Chevrolet of Filipe de Souza came through at full pace and slammed into the back of Yvan Muller’s Chevrolet, with Jo Merszei in the Engstler BMW then hitting Yukinori Taniguchi’s Chevrolet at the same corner.
The race was again red flagged, as the corner was cleared of all the broken cars and debris and restarted another 30 minutes later.
For what was the final restart, again made behind the safety car, Huff blasted past Thompson’s Lada for second at Turn 1, with Nash passing the Lada driver through Lisboa. Though the first two passes were clean, Pepe Oriola made contact with Thompson through the next sequence of corners, knocking him into the barriers and saw him retire with broken suspension. The incident is under investigation by the stewards.
Huff overtook Coronel on the following lap, with Coronel forced to defend against Oriola, eventually losing the spot on the exit of Turn 1 on the final lap.
Huff crossed the line to take his second win of the season and the sixth of his career at Macau, with Oriola and Coronel completing the podium.
The two bamboo-engineering Chevrolets of James Nash and Alex MacDowall finished fourth and fifth, with Yvan Muller making a last lap move on Basseng in his repaired Chevrolet for sixth.
