Around two hundred people entered for twenty seats, drove 7,500 laps in a week, and arrived with 0.806 seconds covering the entire grid. Nicolas Lefrancois won race one. Adam Kaszonyi won race two from nineteenth.
Around two hundred people entered. There are twenty seats.
We opened qualifying for the first Twingo Cup expecting maybe forty signups. We got around two hundred, and then those two hundred people went and drove 7,500 laps in a single week trying to make the grid. That is roughly nine and a half days of continuous track time, for twenty places in a race series that had never run before.
The cutoff came out at a 43.6. First to twentieth was covered by 0.806 seconds. The entire top ten sat inside one second of each other. We had hoped for close racing. We did not expect the field to arrive already that tight.
Race one went to Nicolas Lefrancois, who led from pole and never really looked like losing it, with Adam Kaszonyi shadowing him the whole way and Dominik Seidel taking third. What the timing screen does not show is that Nicolas won it by being boring in the best possible way: across fourteen racing laps his lap times varied by 0.17 seconds. He drove the same lap over and over while everyone behind him fought.
There was plenty of fighting. Twenty six separate contacts happened in the first hundred seconds of the race. Most of them were nothing. One of them was not: David Sesar, who had been the fastest of all two hundred entrants in open qualifying and who cancelled professional esports commitments to be here, was spun on the opening lap by somebody else and spent the rest of the race climbing back to eleventh.
Then race two ran the grid backwards.
Full reverse, not just the top ten. Which meant Adam started nineteenth and Nicolas started twentieth, and the two of them then drove through the entire field. Adam was up to fourteenth by the end of lap one, into the top ten by lap three, and led from lap twelve. Nicolas came from dead last to second. Eighteen places each.
Third was Ege Kancay, who had scraped into this event on the open qualifying cutoff in the first place. He was the most consistent driver on track in race two, 0.41 seconds of variation across the whole race, while people with far better starting positions threw it away around him. Asked about it afterwards, he said: "I am shaking, I don't know how to speak of that."
Not everyone had that night. Jacob Formy started race two on the front row from the reverse grid and finished last after retiring on lap four. Eighteen places lost, the exact mirror of Adam's eighteen gained, in the same twenty five minutes.
On our side it was not a clean evening either. The reverse grid did not reverse on the first attempt, so one of us spent two minutes editing a text file live on stream while forty eight people watched. We left it in the broadcast. That is roughly the standard we are working to.
Twenty cars, ten nationalities, two races, and a championship where the leader is already skipping round two. Round two is Hockenheim.
