Not so much to say about last night's race; probably the most intense and concentrated 5 laps in my entire GTL history - if anyone thinks it was easy running laptimes so close to Ziu's - even a somewhat incapacitated Ziu, then please think again
Practiced hard; Nürburgring always becomes an obsession, as soon as I set wheels on it. Last time, on Silverstone, Ziu had mentioned some setup tips and I decided to try something along those lines. It transformed the car; it drove like it was on rails (but still entirely derailable, if you overcooked it of course
). With practice, I got down to 7:11 offline, so well pleased with a small improvement in qual.
Race itself was pretty nondescript, despite the intensity. Was 3 secs behind Ziu at the start of lap 3, but two small mistakes and one major one, where I clipped a curb in one of the blind S sections and almost rolled the car, saw me lose another 13 secs, to be 16 secs behind at the start of lap 4. Drove as hard as I could for the remainder of the race, for the off chance that Ziu made a mistake, or was slowed enough by his bad arm. Would have been interesting if I hadn't gone off, as I gained 10 secs on him before the finish, but alas, too little too late. Can't compete with Ziu in the bad arm category, but still have my own problems presently, with a Tennis Elbow in my right arm. Yesterday's race did nothing to improve it..
Grats to Ziu on a win despite circumstances, and to Matt for the final podium. Commiserations to those that finished prematurely. Btw, think we all deserve a pat on the back for getting cleanly off the line and through the first corners - seems the only one who had trouble was by his own doing
Incidentally, I'm starting to wonder if there's a cosmic law preventing mere stupid Earthlings from beating aliens - being less than 0.4 secs away from taking fastest lap on a 7+ minutes lap (0.09%) is really getting your nose rubbed in it
If Erling go to improve more and more the next season will very fun, Grats Erling.
Thanks Ziu, but I'll never reach the alien level of you, Ati and the rest of the ETs.
Cheers,
Erling