iORBarkRiverRecap

Pedersen, Fox Split iRacing Off-Road Championship Series Wins at Bark River

Team General Tire’s Cam Pedersen and Williams Esports’ Josh Fox took the checkered flags in iRacing Off-Road Championship Series action from Bark River International Raceway on Wednesday night, as the series hit its halfway point and visited its fourth and final different track of the 2022 season. The way they took those wins, though, couldn’t have been more different.

For Pedersen, it was smooth sailing out front in the first race after qualifying eighth and benefitting from the eight-truck invert at the front of the field. From there, he and Jim Beaver eSports’ Josh Edmundson put on a repeat performance of their opening round at Crandon International Raceway, gapping the field in first and second with Keaton Swane of Factory Simsport a distant third. Pedersen’s third win of the season ensured that he remains the only repeat winner of the year thus far, and allowed him to add another Big Green Egg Green Flag Award to his count.

iORBarkRiverRecap

Vision Wheel Pole Award winner Tommi Hallman maintained his eighth place starting spot in the first race to start first in the feature, and he’d spend the first half of the race collecting his own Big Green Egg Green Flag Award and building a two-second lead over Altus Esports’ Killian Dall’olmo. But the field would close in around halfway, with Dall’olmo even leading a lap in the process, and the top quarter of the field covered by a blanket with just a few laps to go.

From there, chaos struck on Lap 9; contact between Fox and Dall’olmo for second collected points leader Connor Barry of Team General Tire, giving Hallman a two-second gap on Edmundson, who jumped up from fifth. Edmundson would make up the deficit to try and make the winning move, only to suffer a slowdown just corners away from the checkered flag; instead, Fox would take advantage and win in a photo finish by .029 seconds, with Christopher Plumley completing the podium.

iORBarkRiverRecap

Swane would take over the points lead from Barry by virtue of back-to-back top-five finishes on the night. CBR Hard Charger Awards went to Quentin Dall’olmo, who climbed nine spots into 14th in the first race, and Cody Retzlaff, who recovered from a crash in the first race to jump 13 spots into 10th in the second. In the All-Star races, Luke Knupp and Zachary Drapkin would once again go 1-2 in the first race, but eNASCAR Coca-Cola iRacing Series regular Blake Reynolds would take his first victory of the season in the second by battling from 16th to third on Lap 1 and leading most of the race from there.

Top five finishers from iRacing Off-Road Championship Series Round 7 at Bark River were as follows:

  1. #48 Cam Pedersen, 11 laps
  2. #58 Josh Edmundson, +0.868
  3. #21 Keaton Swane, +4.296
  4. #112 Alex Bergeron, +4.763
  5. #2 Connor Barry, +7.703

Top five finishers from iRacing Off-Road Championship Series Round 8 at Bark River were as follows:

  1. #12 Josh Fox, 11 laps
  2. #87 Tommi Hallman, +0.029
  3. #36 Christopher Plumley, +1.204
  4. #112 Alex Bergeron, +1.458
  5. #21 Keaton Swane, +2.260

iORBarkRiverRecap

iRacing Off-Road Championship series points through eight of 16 rounds are as follows:

  1. Keaton Swane, 356
  2. Connor Barry, 345
  3. Felix Roy, 309
  4. Josh Edmundson, 298
  5. Killian Dall’olmo, 294
  6. Alex Bergeron, 282
  7. Connor Parise, 266
  8. Jakob Rafoss, 257
  9. Cam Pedersen, 256
  10. Christopher Plumley, 245

iRacing Off-Road Championship Series action continues Wednesday, July 20 with a return to Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park. Coverage begins at 8:30PM ET on iracing.com/live with a pair of All-Star races in the Volkswagen Beetle Lite, while the pro sim racers return to action in the Pro 4 at 9PM ET.

The iRacing Off-Road Championship Series is supported by CBR Performance Products, Vision Wheel, and Big Green Egg. For more information on iRacing and for special offers, visit www.iracing.com.

Chris Leone

A veteran of the motorsports industry (both physical and digital), Chris Leone contributes coverage of race events of all types to Off-Road Racer. Elsewhere, he is the marketing/communications manager at iRacing, media director of Jim Beaver's Down & Dirty Show, and a frequent contributor to UTV Underground.