Following the second event of the 2023 TCR Europe season, at the Circuit de Pau Ville in France, several TCR Europe drivers have made significant progress in the KUMHO TCR World Ranking.

Thanks to his sixth place in Race 1 and victory in the reversed-grid Race 2, Tom Coronel has broken into the top ten and is likely to improve still further over the next rounds, as with only the last twenty results counting, it’s key to keep an eye on which results are dropped. In Coronel’s case, the events at the end of the European leg of last year’s WTCR will be what he drops next. Since they weren’t his strongest results of the year, replacing them with good scores in the upcoming KUMHO TCR World Tour events, starting with this weekend’s two races at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium, will probably see him surge higher up the order, potentially passing Niels Langeveld to become the leading Dutch driver.

TCR UK and now TCR Europe driver Isaac Smith has made upward progress despite a mixed weekend in Pau. The British driver is now up to fifteenth in the World Ranking, just two places behind the highest-placed Briton, Rob Huff, after former TCR Europe racer Jack Young lost the place after his TCR China debut resulted in a podium and a DNF. With just nineteen results in his TCR career, Smith’s next result is a ‘free’ move forward before he then starts dropping his twentieth oldest result at each race.

John Filippi continues to make progress in the KUMHO TCR World Ranking classification after the switch to a Comtoyou Audi RS 3 LMS from the CUPRA Leon Competición he raced last year. The driver from Corsica climbed 22 places to lie in 46^th place after Pau; he technically qualifies for the TCR World Ranking Final at present due to his placing in the KUMHO TCR World Tour standings, but should he drop out of the top fifteen there, his World Ranking placing is now good enough to qualify him as well.

Finally, Kobe Pauwels and Dušan Borković are also storming up the KUMHO TCR World Ranking, with both climbing over a hundred places after strong weekends at the French street circuit. Pauwels is now 257^th, with Borković just behind in 262^nd. MA:GP Lynk & Co driver Viktor Andersson also climbed up the order, gaining 46 places to lie in 366^th after a DNF and a fifth place in the two Pau races.