STEAM CORNERS, Ohio — Simon Sikes displayed impressive speed during this weekend’s Discount Tires Grand Prix of Mid-Ohio. And finally, yesterday evening on the challenging 2.258-mile Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Sikes was able to parlay that pace into a dominant USF2000 Presented by Cooper Tires race win, his fourth of the season for Pabst Racing.
With Sikes long gone in the lead, the main interest in the concluding race of the weekend was focused on a thrilling battle for second place. Saturday morning race winner Mac Clark held the position for almost the entire 20-lap distance, only to fall victim to an audacious pass in Turn Two on the final lap by 15-year-old Nikita Johnson.
“It was a great day here for Race Three at Mid-Ohio,” Sikes said. “The Pabst car, like always, was perfect. Burke Harrison did a great job on the engineering, Augie Pabst runs such a great organization and the car is just fast. To come and show all the pace we had, it was unfortunate to not get it done yet but Race Three proved to be our time and we were able to get that top spot by quite a margin.
“It felt really great for the team and it’s great points at the end of the day. Just a huge shoutout to Pabst and Doug Mockett for all the support this season.”
Sikes once again started from the pole position, courtesy of having earned his series leading sixth Cooper Tires Pole Award of the season, and was never challenged. The race once again was interrupted by a couple of early full-course cautions, but over the final 14 laps of green-flag racing, Sikes extended his advantage on each and every lap. His eventual winning margin was a whopping 10.3110 seconds.
Once the race settled down, Clark, who started second, found himself under constant pressure from Johnson, with Evagoras Papasavvas and Sam Corry also in close attendance.
As the race entered its final phase, Clark, last year’s USF Juniors Presented by Cooper Tires champion, seemed to have weathered the storm. But Johnson, who also graduated this year from USF Juniors, had been biding his time. The young Floridian intensified his charge with a couple of laps remaining, then went for a bold outside pass at the notoriously tricky Keyhole corner. It worked to perfection.
Clark, to his credit, gave Johnson just enough room and the youngster took full advantage, nosing ahead on the exit of the corner and making second place his own. The results meant that Johnson became tied for second in the points table with Australian Lochie Hughes, whose Jay Howard Driver Development team worked wonders to repair his badly damaged Tatuus USF-22 following a major accident earlier in the day, only for it to grind agonizingly to a halt on the pace lap.
Hughes’ teammate Papasavvas capped a breakthrough weekend with a fourth-place finish to add to his Friday win and second-place finish earlier on Saturday. Corry followed closely in fifth, just ahead of Chase Gardner and Max Garcia.