My goodness me! What a duel for the point! It didn't take long for Juha and Tim to disappear into the far distance and I had no idea that these two carried on a fierce chase right to the checker. Amazing stuff, gys.
Also amazing, the pace that the Brothers Barresi could wring out of the big Ford Mk2. Simply astonishing to see those big muthas haul around this circuit which is more known for demanding crisp handling in a light and small car. Anything but a Mk2. Great job, fellas.
I must correct Clive's statement above of "...only to be hounded around the twisty bits by the more agile Porsches." I'd say it should have read more like:
"...only to be hounded MERCILESSLY around the twisty bits by the more agile Porsches."
OMG! The little put-putts were just dynamite here at Mosport witness Clive out-gunning me in qualifying to start P4 to my P5. Boffo stuff from the little car! Only thanks to my extra bhp up the back straight was I able to sift by on L1 and then hang on for dear life. Trust me, gys; I was driving with some pace. Of course, that just set the stage for Clive and Sam to hound me til a strange collision with Sam in T3 on L7 had Sam arcing off the road. From the server replay that I downloaded, I really can't detect any obvious contact; more like GPL's collision detection making a wild card call to Sam's great loss with a spin to the outfield. Sorry for that, Sam. Down in the hairpin, I made a gaffe by turning in a bit early for 5b and struck the kerb. This bounced me wide and had me slow to retain control. This caused Clive, right on my tail, to lift and swing wide on the grassy verge on the left to avoid hitting my taill. Very bad luck as my error caused Clive to lose several seconds and two positions. Sorry, Evil.
This actually worked to my advantage as now I had Alex in his big Mk2 directly behind working as sort of a blocker for me against the Porsches. I was able to concentrate on getting down decent laps and soon actually started to close in on Mark. The gap was as high as seven seconds at one point around L15 but by L22, was a mere two second deficit. L23 and a long, lazy and unfortunate spin by Mark in 2a opened the door for me to move through to P3 which I was able to hold to the finish. I ran conservatively over the last half-dozen laps or so to maintain that important podium finish. Juha and Tim were long gone. Sam did a great job to recover from that off to finish a fighting P5. Well done. Mark and Evil suffered more assorted mis-adventures to finish P6 and P7, respectively. Sam was not far behindin P8, last car on the lead lap.
Hats off to both Nigel and Dave for being very heads-up in lapping situations. Thanks, lads.
My vision held quite well til the later laps when a little fogging presented itself but it was nothing like the horror of last week's Works event at St. Jovite.
On to Rouen!
