Eight consecutive top-fives for Tucker crown him Tour’s first-ever points champ while Seay starts, ends series with Victory Lane trip
Eight top-five finishes in eight weeks of racing. Now there’s a statistic worthy of a championship.
That’s exactly what iRacing Pro driver Kendal Tucker ended up with after the checkered fell in Wednesday night’s VP Racing Fuels Big-Block Modified Feature event at Lernerville Speedway. For his hard-fought efforts aboard the DIRTcar eSports Tour of Season 2, he now brings the first ever custom-made DIRTcar eSports Tour trophy home to his sim rig in Mt. Airy, NC.
Crossing the stripe right in front of him was the Feature winner, Evan Seay, who capped off his Season 2 campaign the same way he started it – in Victory Lane after leading green-to-checkered in the 50-lap contest.
“It’s definitely pretty cool to come out here and pick up the final win of the season,” Seay told announcer Chase Raudman in the DIRTVision post-race interview. “It’s a great cap to the second season of DIRTcar eSports.”
Over eight weeks of competition, Tucker never finished outside of the top-five. Not once. His worst finish came in Race #7, Pro Late Models at Eldora, where he placed fourth. Wednesday night marked his fourth runner-up finish of the season, just a few car-lengths back from Seay at the checkers.
“Season 2, it honestly couldn’t have gone any better, besides getting couple more wins,” Tucker said. “The ultimate goal at the end of the year, once we heard about this deal [DIRTcar eSports] was putting on, was just to be consistent.”
Tucker’s DIRTcar eSports Tour championship trophy
Seay led the points standings after Season 2’s opening round before Tucker took it over soon after his win with the Pro Late Models at The Dirt Track at Charlotte on December 9. He and Tucker kept it close at the top with their solid night-in and night-out finishes, but Seay sat out the fifth and sixth races on the Tour due to other non-sim commitments, forcing him to retire his horse in the points race.
“Congrats to Kendal [Tucker] on the championship. We had to miss a couple races, but I think we would have been pretty close in the points if I’d have been able to do those couple that we missed,” Seay said.
Regardless, Seay made up for it in the end by leading all 50 laps of Wednesday night’s Feature – his first-ever venture out with the Big-Blocks at Lernerville, which made it all that much more impressive.
“Honestly, I didn’t even know how this night was going to go. I hadn’t run this track with the Big-Blocks yet, so I was kinda winging everything,” he said.
Seay went largely unchallenged for the lead during most of the race. Except on the final lap, where Tucker dove low hard in Turn 1 and pulled a big slide job on the #33. But it didn’t stick, and Seay was easily able to cross back underneath him and take the lead back down the backstretch. Seay held strong in Turn 4 and brought it back home, collecting $250 for the Feature win as the only Tour driver in Season 2 to win more than one main event.
Tucker doing donuts on the front-straightaway after the checkered (Joe Grabianowski Photo)
Overall, both drivers had a terrific season as regulars of the DIRTcar eSports Tour and have plans to chase a points title again in Season 3.
“Hopefully, we’ll be back to defend the title and pick up a couple more wins along the way,” Tucker said.
Feature (50 Laps) – 1. Evan Seay, 2. Kendal Tucker, 3. Logan Rumsey, 4. Richard Murtaugh Jr, 5. Dustin Hall, 6. Chris Hile, 7. Blake Matjoulis, 8. Kevin Dedmon, 9. Jesse Enterkin, 10. Ross Wece, 11. William Racine, 12. Michael Canady, 13. Matt Yorker, 14. Alex Bergeron, 15. Matty Watkins, 16. CJ LaVair, 17. Joe Grabianowski, 18. Joshua Kunstbeck, 19. Chance Carr, 20. Tyler Ducharme, 21. Jonathan Nause, 22. Boddie Parker, 23. Cody Zobrist, 24. Hayden Cardwell
