Had hoped to use one of my looming Porsche drives here, but the damn thing is just undriveable. In addition I'm unable to complete the races without pitstops, despite the modifications, in both this & the previous race. Don't know how others are capable of this
Turned instead to the trusted Lancia, as it was the only other car I had had time to test. With a sub 2-min banzai lap in qual, which I'm not quite sure how I achieved, I even beat my best offline Porsche lap.
Getting the Lancia off the line is hard - it's either total bog down, or excessive wheelspin. Thus no hope of keeping superstarter Dan behind me at the start. I should probably consider myself lucky that aspiring superstarter Matt didn't overtake me too.
Quickly stretched the gap to the cars behind, while chasing Dan & Clive. Passed the latter when he spun at Rivazza. Worried he would stage a comeback in the faster Beemer, but initially the gap stayed around 6 secs, and later increased in large chunks, when he apparently met more trouble.
Thus could focus on chasing Dan. He can often be relied upon to start out like lightning, only to deflate later in the race. When you most need this however, he sometimes pulls a consistent race out of the hat, like last night. When we reached about 19 laps, my moderately worn tyres seemed to lose all grip. That handed Dan a few secs, until I adapted to the new situation. Was closing towards the end, but too little too late - another 5 laps would have been interesting. Late in the race, I caught and passed a slow driving Daz. Not sure what was wrong - couldn't see any damage on his car; fuel maybe?
Grats to Ziu & Dan; commiserations to the retirees.