WOOHOO! Got lucky and emerged the victor in this barn burner!
Lucky? Oh, sure... In a late lap, I drifted wide on the exit of the North Banking and drilled the grail...HARD. Under Pro Rules, that would have taken a corner off. I veered away and skirted the verge on the right and came within a blink of losing the McLaren. Somebody up there likes me.
A dramatic finish and I thought for sure that Axel was going to gun me down coming off the South Banking and the run to the flag. He came up a mere 8/100 short. Great race, buddy!
And I could just weep for poor Greg. This was his race to win/lose. Only a slightly wide pass through the Vialone in a late lap and the resultant crash spoiled his chances. GT... You ran like a champ! Good on ya.
Dean's pole position apparently resulted from a reset during a test start procedure late in qualifying that confused GPL and eliminated that need to do the road course portion of the circuit. Goofy but I've seen this before here.
Apologies to Sam for diving underneath him at the Parabolica in an early lap that forced him wide. I should have known better to test my braking power there. While there was no collision, it set the stage for a side-swiping by Axel that pushed Sam off. Bad luck there, SB.
Not much to tell beyond the whole 22 laps were real nail-biters with constant back-and-forth action. Sorry to have lost Tim at some point with a disco. OH! I just remembered... The first several laps were a nightmare of lag. Dean was directly ahead of me on that first lap and til he fell off in the Parabolica, his Ferrari was blinking in and out like a wild thing. I kept my distance for fear of running over him. After that, it took a couple more laps for the lag bar to settle down. I fully expected to get disco'd myself but managed to survive.
Not to be missed in this event was race # 1,001 in Evil Clive's UK career across all sim platforms and his 837th start in GPL races. I stumbled across this fact just before yesterday's race and didn't have the opportunity to offer up congratulations at the close of qualifying. What a trooper!
These stats are available on the championship pages by accessing the "Top 25 drivers by participation" link seen there. Once again, congratulations, Clive!