It was a crazy night for the LoO IMCA Style Modified show at Lernerville but Hunter (Connor) New came up victorious as beat some really fast drivers. Hunter New is the first driver ever in LoO iRacing history to win a league race, NOT named James A. Murphy. Mark Manno led the first 10 laps and then Hunter was able to lead the final 20 to claim the bounty set on James.
The event ran smoothly until heat race 1. Jared Murphy was running 3rd, and AJ Hunsinger was running 4th. AJ Hunsinger had a run off of turn 2 and did a slider on Jared. The two made contact off of turn 4 when Jared’s car kicked out sideways, which sent Hunsinger into the wall and onto his roof.
Although Hunsinger was upside down, it was a soft roll and the ESD Performance #33A was not damaged. Hunsinger, now stuck upside down, elected to tow to the pits in hopes to make it back onto the track before the end of the yellow flag. Hunsinger just missed the green flag when he exited the pits. He stopped off of turn number 4 but was beyond the cone. While Race Control acknowledged Hunsinger was stopped and waiting to come back onto the track, Hunsinger began pulling onto the track after another yellow flag flew, but before Race Control cleared him to re-enter the track surface.
By rule, AJ Hunsinger was DQ’ed from the remainder of the heat race for exiting the pits without being cleared by Race Control. When Hunsinger was given the DQ, it not only DQ’ed him from competition in the remainder of the heat race, but also the entire event which was not intended. In a scramble, the admins quickly kept composure, made a new session during the redraw on the Peacemaker Gaming broadcast out of fairness to the accidental permanent session DQ given to AJ.
The league admins advanced the second sessions practice and qualifying and manually lined up the drivers during the pace laps of the feature race. There were discrepancies with car numbers as a couple of the drivers car numbers were different than the previous session which made lining up the field in the correct order challenging. This time consuming process led to the server getting messed up and the race had to be ran manually with manual cautions, manual restarts, and manual restart lineups. But in the end, Hunter New was the driver that claimed the checkered flag.
One of the reasons the car numbers got mixed up was because a driver had trouble with his PC. He joined late and couldn’t change his car number in the first session. He ended up sharing a number with another driver who had already claimed it. The driver with the PC issue also didn’t change his car number in the second session because it was a rush to join. This caused a lengthy line up process. Many unexpected things happened during the race, but Race Control remained calm and we managed to make it work.
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