CHENNAI, Jan 28: Making the best use of his pole-position start, Bengaluru’s Sohil Shah roared to a big win, his second of the season, here on Saturday in the premier MRF Formula 2000 category as the fourth and final round of the MRF MMSC-FMSCIIndian National Car Racing Championship 2022 headed for a grand climax on the morrow at the Madras International Circuit, about 40 km from here.
Recording an equally facile win was Coimbatore veteran Arjun Balu (Race Concepts) who hardly played a false note while orchestrating a massive victory, his fourth of the season, in the top-end Indian Touring Cars category.
Nellore’s Viswas Vijayraj (DTS Racing) also notched up a fluent lights-to-flag win in the Formula LGB 1300 race to move within eight points of championship leader Raghul Rangasamy (MSport) from Mamallapuram who took the second spot ahead of Kolkata’s Arya Singh (Momentum Motorsports).
The win notwithstanding, 21-year-old Sohil is languishing in the sixth position in the championship having missed five races earlier, while Salem’s Sai Sanjay finished second behind the Bengalurean with Divy Nandan (Gurugram) completing the podium.
Sai Sanjay remained at the top of the leaderboard, with a 34-point lead over Chennai’s Mohamed Ryan who finished fourth in today’s race.
Later, Balu was in a league of his own as he built up a commanding lead halfway into the first of the 10 laps after starting from pole position to make up for a disappointing third round a week back.
Behind him was Arjun Narendran (Arka Motorsports), also from Coimbatore, came second, but remained 14 points adrift of Balu in the championship standings. Rayo Racing’s Sandeep Kumar from Chennai came third.
Chennai racers dominated the Indian Junior Touring Cars category with Gurunath Meiyappan (Race Concepts) finishing ahead of Performance Racing pair of Akkineni Anand Prasad and Deepak Ravikumar.
Consequently, Anand Prasad extended his championship lead to 22 points ahead of team-mate Raja Rajan.
Another Chennai driver, Ritesh Rai (Performance Racing) came through untroubled in the Super Stock category with Narendran (Redline Racing) and Diljith TS (DTS Racing) following in that order.
Rai, thus, opened up a commanding 38-point lead over Narendran on the leaderboard.
Ritesh Rai and Avik Anwar from Dhaka, Bangladesh recorded their maiden win each in the Volkswagen Polo Cup double-header today. After winning the first race, Ritesh sat out the second that was won by Anwar, who has raced in the UAE and Malaysia, and is in his second season here.
The win took Anwar (79 points) to third place in the championship behind Pratik Sonawane (89) and Raaj Bakhru (83) with two more races to be run on Sunday.
Later, Gurugram’s Justin Singh scored his fifth win of the season in the MRF Saloons (Toyota Etios) category that gave him a 23-point advantage with just one more race to be run on Sunday and a maximum of 25 points on offer. (UNI)
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