Photo: Teamwork Motorsport

Sunny Wong wins heavily curtailed Macau Touring Car Cup race

Sunny Wong scored his first Macau Touring Car Cup victory in a heavily shortened event, which was mostly held behind the safety car and red-flagged after a crash on the second lap.

There was drama before the race even started when Wong Wan Long crashed out his Mitsubishi EVO on the gridding up lap at Mandarin, slamming the car into the barriers at the famous corner, and was unable to take his third position on the grid.

At the rolling start, Wong held the lead in the Teamwork Motorsport-run Subaru WRX STi ahead of the GTO Racing Nissan GTR of Mitsuhiro Kinoshita, with Paul Poon keeping in touch in his Teamwork Peugeot RCZ.

The key event of the race took place on lap two, when Lei Kit Meng in his RPM Racing Team Nissan GTR crashed out at Mandarin and damaged the front-left of his car.

Lei then dragged the wreckage around the track, which saw the safety car deployed, while the car, with front splitter hanging off, dropped oil around the whole track and was hastily black-flagged by the stewards, but to no avail.

The race was then red flagged with an oil line left all around the circuit, and the clock ticked down with just 40 minutes set aside for the race to be held.

The cars headed out another 20 minutes later for a restart, but there was trouble as Lui Man Kit’s RPM Racing Mini Cooper stopped on track, and forced a second lap behind the safety car.

The extended delay meant the race was eventually restarted with just enough time for one more lap.

Sunny Wong made a perfect restart, and was well ahead before the danger zone at Lisboa, and held off Kinoshita’s Nissan until the finish to win the race by half a second, in a race which was effectively just two full green flag laps.

The two cars managed to pull out a near ten second gap over Paul Poon’s Peugeot in just one lap, with Poon taking the 1.6T class victory, his seventh at the circuit, with his Teamwork team-mates Samson and Alex Fung crossing the line in formation behind him, cementing a perfect result for the Hong Kong-based squad.

The rest of the top ten were occupied by Mitsubishi EVOs in the Over 1950cc class, with Wei Chao Yin sixth ahead of Ko Tim Tak, Chan Chi Ha, Ng Kin Veng and Stephen Lee.