Ryan finishes 10th in World Championship

If you wanted to see one race that summarised the fortunes of 2018 World Champion Tim Ryan, the season finale at Knoxville Raceway was it. Ryno would take the quick time in qualifying and lead the way in his opening head to take a dominant win, thus taking pole position for the feature race.

On would roll the feature race and Ryno would get off to a great start and hold the lead for more than half the race holding a mid track line for the duration. However the track itself would evolve to favour the outside line, and upon pushing the very bumpy outside line, a slight rut in the road would kill his momentum, and the 2019 Champion Alex Bergeron would drill him from behind. Certainly not intentional, but an unfortunate set of circumstances that pretty well summed up Ryno’s season.

Ryno showed great speed throughout the season, however was not as dominant out front and was then buried in the pack mo and got caught out in incidents, with many out of his control. Tim did manage two complete white wash rounds taking the Quick Time, Heat & Feature races flag to flag at Volusia Speedway Park and Eldora Speedway, being the only driver other than the champion to be a multi-round winner.

The championship defence was lost with these costly feature incidents, and especially early on in the season with heat incidents causing Ryno to go to the B Main to make it to the feature. In the end Ryno would fail to finish in 6 of the 10 rounds, thus demonstrating the feast of famine season that was 2019. However he is quick to admit that you make your own luck, and staying up the front is where you can avoid those kinds of situations as he did in 2018, and through reduced availability was unable to achieve in 2019 consistently.

With the 2019 season coming to close, we would like to congratulate Alex Bergeron on becoming the 2019 iRacing NOS Energy Drink World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series World Champion. Our 2018 rival was the class of the field in 2019, and a richly deserved champion.