The #CaliforniaDreamin tour gamers have said goodbye to two more competitors with Riley Gerster and Kamil Pawlowski both getting eliminated in Monterey.
Gerster, the Canadian Gear.Club qualifier was the first to receive the news, with Rudy van Buren eliminating him from the Orange Team after the day’s planned final session. Despite the disappointment of being cut, Gerster was upbeat about his performance and the World’s Fastest Gamer experience.
“I kind of expected to get eliminated, but I was pretty close!” Gerster said.
“I’m really proud of myself. I got pretty far in the competition and beat a few pro sim racers. The whole experience has just been amazing and hopefully I’ll be back to throw down again for WFG3.”
Though van Buren’s choice was clear for him, Blue team judge Jann Mardenborough had a trickier time decided who should go home and staged a shootout between two of his drivers at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. Mardenborough advanced Mitchell de Jong and Sebastian Job to the next stage of the competition, and left Maximilian Benecke and Kamil Pawlowski to fight it out.
“Today’s been a tough day, a lot of driving for the guys. I decided to end the day a bit differently,” Mardenborough explained.
“I had four guys to start the day, and one was getting eliminated, but I just couldn’t make my mind up at the end of session two. So, I put my two slowest drivers, Kamil and Max, into a two lap shootout—slowest driver goes home. The lap time didn’t lie, there was a 1.3 second difference, and unfortunately Kamil was the one to go home.”
This competition represented Pawlowski’s first time behind the wheel of a proper racing car, and the skills he learned from Mardenborough, van Buren and head judge Juan Pablo Montoya he will carry into future real-world driving opportunities.
“This competition taught me basically how to drive. It was my first experience behind the real racing wheel,” Pawlowski explained.
“I started out so immature and without any experience, but I got to the point where I could drive a real proper racing car and that’s just been an amazing opportunity. All the racing coaches, and to take all their advice and learn how to drive the real car has just been amazing.
“I felt like today at Laguna Seca was my day. I was really pushing the car to the limit and I was really good and consistent. The pressure at the end was too high for me and I just didn’t make it.
“I’m still so grateful that I was able to be here, and got to race on all these tracks—Willow Springs, Thermal, Las Vegas and especially Laguna Seca.”
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