Grand Prix Rejects

Autosport wrote:
St. Laurent: Championship win "a vindication"

Pierre St. Laurent expressed relief at finally having won the AutoReject 2.0 Drivers' Championship. The 20-year-old Canadian, having been blighted by major injuries over the two previous years, contested a closely fought championship with Diego Pereira and Vaclav Malsyz before finally emerging victorious in the final feature race of the season at Algarve.

"It feels like a vindication, a real sense of relief," said a visibly emotional St. Laurent. "These past two years have been really rough, with the physical rehabilitation and the constant mental stress. All the pressure from not being able to race, not being able to walk unassisted for awhile; it all starts to really gnaw away at your sense of self-confidence."

"And I was in a pretty dark place for awhile, thinking whether I'd be the same driver I was before all of this, whether or not I'd lost something important. To come back and finally win this thing, just to find myself in the seat of a racing car again, really went a long way in dispelling a lot of that. It's a great feeling."

"Obviously, I'm overjoyed for the team, and kudos to both Diego and Vaclav, for putting up a heck of a fight, but, yeah, just really happy that I managed to prove this thing to myself."