After a brilliant win in the Silverstone rain, Alpine Sim Racing’s Otis Lawrence has taken the lead in this year’s F1 Sim Racing World Championship. In a superb performance across Event 2’s three races this week, the Welshman recorded three pole positions and a second-place finish to complement his victory.

It’s Otis’ second win of the campaign, putting the 18-year-old on 81 points, six clear at the top of the Drivers’ standings. In the Teams’ Championship, Alpine Sim Racing sit a strong second with 121 points, just 18 off the top spot.

Otis led all 26 laps from pole position at Silverstone in extremely challenging conditions, with rain a constant throughout the race. At one stage he was nearly two seconds clear, but managing his Intermediate tyres proved crucial, and he crossed the line with a 0.878s lead to secure 26 valuable points.

“My fourth win of my career, and it feels amazing to be honest,” said a delighted Otis. “My team is just fantastic and we have such great momentum. After a bad start today with an incident in the earlier race, it was good to bounce back with a win, and it proves that you should never give up. We have to keep pushing now and hope to come back even stronger at the next event.”

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Otis made reference to a last-lap incident at the Barcelona-Catalunya Circuit which cost him the chance of another potential victory. Once again, after starting from pole, he made a great start and led the first nine laps, prior to the tyre stop.

When he emerged from the pits, his team-mate Josh Idowu — who had stepped in for Dani Bereznay at this track — took over the lead of the race with an impressive around-the-outside move into Turn 1 to overtake Jarno Opmeer.

Despite intense pressure from behind, Otis held onto third place and, on lap 27, swapped positions with Josh to take second and hunt down the leader. The final stages of the race became a thrilling cat-and-mouse duel, with the leaders swapping positions lap after lap with the aid of DRS.

Such was its effect that no one wanted to lead heading into the final lap. An incident between the leaders caused chaos and, on the run down to Turn 1, Opmeer ran into the side of Otis, effectively ending both their races.

Josh took a career best second place in the melee to record his first podium for Alpine and his first top-three finish since 2022. “It’s great to be back and that race was crazy towards the end. I didn’t expect all that mayhem with the DRS games — but I managed to avoid it and get a podium, which is great for collecting more points for the team.”

In the opening race of Event 2, at Jeddah, Otis again led away from pole position, but both he and Dani were unable to keep rival Opmeer at bay as he ran an alternate strategy and had a faster compound tyre fitted at the end of the race. Otis finished the race in second, 3.2s off the lead, while Dani secured P5.

There is a short break now before Event 3 at Spa, Zandvoort and Austin on 13-14 May.