For the vast majority of Saturday’s NASCAR Pinty’s Series event at Circuit ICAR, Marc-Antoine Camirand and Alex Tagliani raced in close proximity to each other without much contact, if any at all.
However, when it came time to decide whose name got engraved into the trophy, the defending NASCAR Pinty’s Series champion wasn’t messing around, and as is his style, wasn’t afraid to use the fenders on his No. 96 Chevrolet.
With less than five laps remaining in Saturday’s second-to-last road course event of the year, Camirand elected to make an optimistic lunge heading into the corner, barely getting his nose to the left side of Alex Tagliani.
The GM Paille Chevrolet then snapped loose under braking, where he slid up into the side of Tagliani, who had control of the majority of the middle portion of Saturday’s 55-lap contest in Mirabel, Quebec.
Here’s the winning move for Marc-Antoine Camirand, who spun the No. 18 of Alex Tagliani in the closing laps of the #Evirum125 at Circuit ICAR.
— Joseph Srigley (@joe_srigley) August 26, 2023
Camirand would easily maintain his position in the lead, while a quick spin by Tagliani knocked him back to second place, to be eventually taken over by Alex Labbe, who was setting a blistering pace late in the race.
Labbe, a regular in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, sat nearly six seconds behind the race leader when the spin occurred, but after grabbing second was able to close an entire two seconds in a lap that clocks in at just over 60 seconds.
The No. 36 Chevrolet would charge extremely hard in the race’s final three laps, but just wouldn’t have the necessary time to catch Camirand, who went on to score his fourth victory of the NASCAR Pinty’s Series and the ninth of his career.
Labbe would come home in second place, while Alex Tagliani was able to recover to finish in third place, after leading a solid portion of the event. Treyten Lapcevich was able to salvage a fourth-place result, while LP Dumoulin came from the back early to finish fifth.
Andrew Ranger came home in sixth, while Justin Arseneau, Daniel Bois, JP Bergeron, and DJ Kennington completed the top-10 finishers.
Raphael Lessard, in his second race driving the No. 12 for Mathieu Kingsbury, was running up among the top five early in the race, when a mechanical issue caused him to stop on-track and fall multiple laps down making repairs.
Kevin Lacroix faced a similar fate in the closing stages of the race, with mechanical issues relegating him to a finish of 22nd.
Leaving ICAR, the final event for the NASCAR Pinty’s Series in Quebec, there are just two more races on the schedule this season, one at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park on Labor Day Weekend, and another at the end of September at Delaware Speedway,
