Porsche Deluxe Carrera Cup North America provisional champion Riley Dickinson scored his tenth race win of the season at the Circuit of The Americas (COTA) today.
It was a hometown win for the 21-year-old from New Braunfels, Texas and an opportunity to celebrate his Pro class championship with friends and family at the Austin, Texas track. Adding to the sweet taste of victory for the driver of the No. 53 Racing For Children’s Kellymoss Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car was the dramatic, first lap pass on pole sitter Tom Sargent to take the lead in the 35-minute plus one lap, race.
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“The hole opened up at the start and I took advantage of it. Kudos to Tom [Sargent] for racing me clean. He could have very easily done something over the limit, but he didn’t,” said Dickinson. “Thank you to everyone at Kellymoss for such a strong effort. We put a lot of work into this one to finish the season. I feel like we can actually improve on a few things for tomorrow. Personally, I know that I need to work on sector three, Tom showed me how to do it this morning in qualifying and I need to work on that a bit. We will go into tomorrow swinging and see what we can get done.
“Huge thank you to Porsche for bringing us to this event. This is my first time racing here at my home track on the F1 weekend, so it is quite special. Anytime you are able to get up on the podium during an F1 event is really cool. For me this experience even topped being on the podium at Miami. This time we had a lot of fans and when the national anthem concluded and with all the people cheering it was super, super cool. I had the heart pounding moment when we came up for the pre-race and we parked on the front straight. I looked up at turn one and it was packed with fans; I couldn’t see any grass at all.”
The penultimate round of the year saw longtime Porsche entrant James Sofronas (Villa Park, California) win the Pro-Am class in the No. 14 GMG Racing Porsche.
The Am class continues to be the nailbiter of the class championship as MDK Motorsports teammates Mark Kvamme (Columbus, Ohio) and Scott Noble (Dallas, Texas) exchanged the lead on track to push the title chase into the last race of the year. Kvamme extended his chances for the Am championship in the No. 43 into tomorrow’s finale but remains 10 points out of the lead behind Noble.
The second race of the weekend, and final race of the year, will start on Sunday, October 21 at 10:50 a.m. CT/11:50 a.m. ET.