Page 27 - 2021CalSpeedMagazineAug

Round 8 - Aug 15
Round #8 of the CalSpeed Super Series Championship is not just another points paying round; it’s the Classico Grand Prix. This is the crown jewel event of the regular season, and it brings out the hitters every year. Win this event, and you will be etched into the history books as one of the best. Here in 2021, we saw yet another new face on top of the box...
Before you can begin to race the Classico Grand Prix, first you must qualify. For 2021, we had a familiar face to kick things off with a fast time: Michael Hazlewood. It was two Classico GP pole positions in a row for Hazlewood, locking him into the top starting spot for heat one, while usual suspect at the sharp end of qualifying Sam Hunt clocked the second-best time. Picking up pole for the third heat of the first group would be one of the best in the business at CalSpeed, Darren Mercer, trading the officials hat for a helmet this weekend.
Of the three, Hunt asserted himself as the one to beat, sweeping both of his heat races to go along with his P2 in qualifying to earn pole position in the A-Main. For his part, Mercer also picked up a heat win, with Andres Prieto, Jose da Silva each adding to their heat win tallies as well. As we have seen before on Classico, the racing god’s shine on fresh faces nearly every year, with Matt McCoy and Jeremy Aldridge picking off heat wins of their own.
With the heat of the track wreaking havoc on some of the engines, a 4th heat and an extra Main were run to help facilitate better racing, causing less mechanical issues, so the fabled D-Main returned to the Classico Grand Prix. We have had a similar case in the past, a driver who had issues earlier in the day would come back to steal away the win. After winning his heat, but coming up light at the scales, 2020 Classico GP winner Ayrton Demoss climbed all the way up from 16th on the grid to steal away the win from Joey Andrews with about three to go...
The C-Main saw a rare flag-to-flag win out of pole sitter Denis Shakhovski, but it wasn’t so cut and dried as that term seems to imply. Nor-Cal’s Wes Dent was first to apply the pressure, but he gave way to Mike Chen for a lap, before Bryan Armbrust took his turn in the P2 position. In the trio of challengers, it was Armbrust who had the most to say, breaking away from the rest of the pack and closing in on Denis via the fastest lap of the race. Come to the line however, he was just short, with Denis Shakhovski holding on for the C-Main win by just .071 seconds at the line.
As rare and uncommon as the flag-to-flag runs are, the B-Main made two of them at the 2021 edition of the Classico GP. This time the nod goes to Spencer Russell, who nipped former Super Series champ Patrick Britain for the lead on lap one, and with it, bumped out to about a 3/4 second lead. Weirdly enough, that advantage didn’t grow or shrink much at all across the 12 lap contest, aside from the occasional peak at a pass attempt from the trailing group. Instead, Russell went unchallenged, an impressive feat with Logan Calvin the one he had to match, with
B-Main Spencer Russell
C-Main Winner Denis Shakhovskii
D-Main Winner Ayrton DeMoss