After losing out badly in the opening round i needed to score some good points here to keep myself in touch with the faster guys in the championship. The problem at Monsanto is that pushing hard usually ends your race prematurely plus, as Jason said, it is so easy to be the joint victim of someone else's mistake
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I used the same setup as last season ( although last season I was eased out of the race on lap1
) The 66 Waza has great bucket loads of power if you can set the gearing just right and for this race I had to set 1st gear for use out of the hairpin at the bottom of the hill, which meant that I struggled off the grid at the start.
Goran took full advantage of that and whipped his Brabham into the lead.
Once the Wazamobile was rolling I easily caught him and started to look for a way to get past him. I figured the safest place to be on this track is as far away from other cars as possible!! lol, which really means being in the lead if you can get there.
I did not expect Goran to make it easy for me in his Brabham, but I was hoping that I could force a small error from him whilst he was on cold tyres and full tanks. Then to my surprise he moved over and allowed me a free pass!!!!
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Well, Waza training means that you never question an opportunity, so I took the lead!
I suspect that Goran was being sneaky and hoping that I would crash out and leave him to pick up the pieces
The next few laps I pushed as hard as I could to try and build a safety gap, without getting stuck on those straw bales. Slowly I eased away until I had about 6-7 secs lead and from then on it was a case of just maitaining the gap as i lapped a few backmarkers.
For the last 10 laps I drove very carefully and was amazed to finish the race with 8 gallons of fuel in the tank and still comfortably ahead of Goran and Sven.
Grats to all the finishers, a triumph for anyone around this circuit.
Also thanks to those who sorted out the server problems just before the race