The second-place result at Mosport for John was also his seventh top-three performance of the season. He also earned the valuable “Hard Charger” bonus championship point and an extra $2,000 for improving the most positions in the race. “Today was a great race,” Edwards said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t qualify well. I was hoping that we could lock out the front row with Newman Wachs, but Jonathan got pole and I didn’t have a great qualifying, so I knew I had to make up for it in the race. In the first few laps, we were running all together and I had a bit of an advantage coming out of (Turn) 5 compared to Simona and Frederic (Vervisch) but Simona was getting Frederic’s draft, so I wasn’t able to close up on her much. Finally, she made a mistake and I was able to get by her and then just caught Frederic and passed him.
“After that, it was a bit of a boring race. We were just running lap times. I was pretty similar to Jonathan, a tenth (of a second) quicker some laps, a tenth slower other laps, but all in all, it was a great day for the team. I think we scored the maximum points that a team can score, because I got the Hard Charger even and got that extra point. Jonathan got pole and we got the first two positions for points. It’s really a great day. We made up a lot of championship ground and we’re looking forward to the next two rounds.”
Vervisch came home third in the No. 17 Quartier/Isomo/Shinokki entry from Genoa Racing. It was the fourth podium result of the season for the Belgian, but it was his first podium since a third-place run in Race #2 of the New Jersey doubleheader in June. Vervisch continues to lead the Rookie of the Year point standings with 113 points. He is now 25 points ahead of Spanish driver Borja Garcia with two races remaining on the schedule.“We were very strong since the beginning of this weekend,” Vervisch said. “P3 is a good result after those difficult races we had. I have to thank the team for the good car now. We just have to try to make the best of the last two races, because I think we can still do some good efforts. We showed that we still can be fast, so we will work on being faster.”
Driving in his first Atlantic Championship race in more than two years, Canadian racer Robert Wickens found the Atlantic competition more competitive than expected and wound up fourth in the No. 18 Genoa Racing machine. Defending series champion Markus Niemela came home fifth in the No. 1 Jensen MotorSport machine for his third straight top-five run.
