Luca Engstler dominates Sepang’s Race 1

Luca Engstler continued in his very successful 2018 season with a victory at Sepang. After winning the 24H Dubai in January and clinching the TCR Middle East title, the young German dominated the field in the opening round of TCR Asia and TCR Thailand.
The Liqui Moly Team Engstler Volkswagen Golf GTI cars finished 1-2, with Malaysia’s Mitchell Cheah crossing the line only 1.5 seconds behind his teammate on his maiden TCR race. For most of the race the team’s third driver, Diego Moran was following the two leaders on the way to secure a 1-2-3 finish. However the Ecuadorian was hit by a drive-through penalty for jump-start and dropped to ninth.
Maximum Racing’s Lo Sze Ho benefited from Moran’s penalty and drove his Honda Civic FK2 to third place, ahead of the pair of Honda cars run by R Engineering and driven by Akash Neil Nandy and Abdul Kaahtir; the latter was the winner of the Asia Cup.

The race for TCR Thailand was enlivened by a close fight for the lead between the Honda Civic cars of the reigning champion Chariya Nuya (Billionare Boy Racing) and Pattarapol Vongprai (Vattana Motorsport). Victory went to Vongprai who overtook Nuya on lap 8 to finish seventh overall; eventually Nuya salvaged the second place by a narrow margin ahead of Nattanid Lewattanavaragul in the Morin Racing SEAT León.

The only non-finisher was Ivan Szeto in the other Civic entered by Maximum Racing who crashed on lap 2 after a collision with Douglas Khoo’s Viper Niza Racing SEAT.

The second race will start at 16:00 local time (10:00am CET).