The first step on the road to the 2022 F1 Esports Pro Series started this week with the Challenger Series. Players qualified through online events held late last year, and the top drivers on each platform – Xbox, PlayStation, and PC – race in quarter-length grands prix over a 12-race, six-round season.
Following the Challenger Series, the top six drivers on each platform qualify for the Pro Exhibition. There they’ll be fighting for a spot on the Pro Series grid with any drivers from the 2021 season who haven’t secured a 2022 drive, with the ten official F1 teams required to select at least one of their three drivers from the Exhibition event.
The racing started this week, with each group of drivers facing the same two races, at Shanghai and Bahrain, and it was the Xbox Challengers who were first up. Tom Manley took the first round win after starting on pole position, but didn’t have it all his own way. Manley stayed out an extra lap on the soft tyres, and found himself falling behind Zak Oates before both cars swapped to the mediums. However Oates caught a five-second penalty for a pitlane transgression, and then appeared to slow before the finish. That allowed Manley – who’d re-passed Ryan Jacobs in the meantime – to take the win, with Jacobs second and Sean McLean third.
Manley then took the double, despite starting only 11th in Bahrain, successfully running an opposite strategy that saw him start on medium tyres before switching to softs for the closing stages. A three-second time penalty initially seemed to dampen his efforts, but this was later rescinded, reinstating his win over Jed Norgrove, with Oates in third.
The PlayStation events saw two drivers come away tied at the top of the table on 30 points, with Mirko Suriano and Duncan Hofland leading the way, though Matthew Alder and Joost Noordijk with the race wins.
Alder started Shanghai on pole position, and seemed to have everything in hand until George Nader passed him for the race lead at the start of lap nine. However Alder retook the spot with a DRS-assisted pass down the long back straight a lap later and kept his advantage to the finish, with Nader second and Hofland rounding out the podium.
Similarly, Noordijk ran his own almost perfect race at Bahrain, only briefly falling behind Suriano and Nader in a three-wide moment at turn one that saw Nader spin out of contention. The Dutch driver retook the lead shortly after to claim the win from Suriano, with Hofland again in third. Alder meanwhile had a torrid race that saw him crash out from fourth to finish outside the points.
The pole-to-win conversion continued with PC Challengers, as Tomek Poradzisz completed a dominant victory at Shanghai to win by over seven seconds from Ulas Ozyildrim – who left it late to snatch second place from Szelle Kristof.
However Poradzisz couldn’t keep that momentum going in Bahrain, ending up disqualified from qualifying alongside Ozyildrim for an invalid lap. That meant the championship leaders would start from the back, with John Evans claiming pole from Wilson Hughes. Evans nearly made it another win from pole, but Spain’s Samuel Bean snatched the lead with a last-lap turn one overtake for which Evans had no answer. Hughes rounded out the podium. A stellar fightback from Poradzisz meant he claimed sixth to take the championship lead ahead of Bean, with Ozyildrim in third.
The final 17 drivers have got their names into the 2022 DTM Esports championship, following a pair of events this week.
A second online shootout event, at the Hockenheimring, took the same format as the first, with two main heats that would see five drivers qualify from each, and a last-chance repechage giving four further spots for the drivers from sixth to 20th in each heat.
Familiar names qualified from the first 30-minute race, with Veloce Esports driver Marko Pejic taking a lights-to-flag victory. Pejic and fellow qualifier Isaac Price – who ended the race in fifth – had initially qualified through Shootout 1 earlier in the month, but were disqualified after not attending the driver briefing. They were joined by Jonas Wanner, Matija Markovic, and Attila Diner.
The second heat saw a comfortable win from pole for Sweden’s Christopher Hogfeldt, ahead of Hungarian driver Adam Pinczes, with Leon Rudinger, Axel Vermeylen, and Robert Wiesenmueller all qualifying too.
That just left the repechage, won by Hungary’s Martin Barna from Spain’s Manuel Rodriguez – a driver better known for his Gran Turismo exploits – with Ralf Piringer and Luciano Witwoert.
As well as the 28 drivers from the shootout qualifiers, there’ll be three who came through a special wildcard event held at the Nürburgring. Julien Fox won that event from Alex Mosin and Florian Bodin.
With the 31-driver line-up now complete, the DTM Esports Championship will get underway on 24th February, with a prize of a season’s drive in the real-world 2023 DTM Trophy.
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Keyword: 2022 F1 Esports Pro Series begins | FOS Future Lab