UKGPL Season 33 (2018) 1965 F1 - Monza 10k - Jun 26

[miner2049er]

Well that was fun.

Had a sideways moment at Lesmo 1 early on but the BRM was able to catch the field again and I had a battle with Evil and Dave for a few laps with Clive enjoying the tow and happy to sit there until I crashed again, which I duly did.

Swapped places a few times with Dave's Ferrari but he hit me in the side/rear at Curva Grande but I'm not reporting. I was in the lead but I got close to the middle line and Dave was laying rubber down and drifted out so just one of those things I think. Hindsight says I should have just lifted, let him go and followed him. It wasn't like he was going to pull away.

Had some good, consistent lap times after a reset and Stop n Go but on full tanks was never going to get back to the field again. Kept going hoping for Dave to have a disaster which never came. Well done Dave.

Happy to get the fastest lap, albeit due to the tow.

I do have a question though.

On my replay Dave burst into flames and lost a wheel but carried on driving and miraculously the flames went and he grew a new wheel, all at speed. It happened on Lap 10 at Curva Grande.

How does that happen?

[Cookie]

You allways race on your own GPL, your GPL thought that the collision was harder than Daves GPL thought,
in between there is the server who receives your PCs signal and gives it to Daves PC and vice versa.

This exchange happens 15 times per second ( Bandwith "every 4") if there is some lag in a connection your PC has to estimate the "future" for a longer time.

[Arf Arf Arf]

You have to look very closely at those results to see that Clive and I finished 0.096 secs apart. That was quite a buzz.

I started 5th, I think, but my gearing was such that I entered the first corner fighting someone for last position as everyone just dragged past me. Fears that I cocked it up were soon forgotten as I realised that what I lacked in the low gears was irrelevant on a track like Monza, and that I was pretty competitive in top gear. The first few laps saw Cookie and Dean moving away from the rest of us, and only small mistakes broke up the rest of us. I saved all my mistakes for later, so was doing quite well out of this, and enjoying the incredibly close racing. I blame my first off track excursion on a sudden frame drop upsetting my mojo as I came to the Parabolica (had frame drop all night along s/f straight), but the others were totally my fault.

Every time I slipped back I seemed able to slowly but consistently catch the guys ahead of me, but when I found myself with 6 laps to go, and Dave 878 yards ahead of me and Clive even further I thought that the best I could do was maybe catch Dave. However on the penultimate lap there I was passing Clive, thinking that it was a mistake to pass so soon, and he'd probably draft me near the end of the race. He nearly did too, as the results show. Great fun!

[EvilClive]

Grats to Dean and tough luck on Axel who was guaranteed at least a 2nd spot when the 2 of them ran away at the front.

After the problems joining the server I had no time to sort out any car/setups, so I loaded the Honda setup from the Mosport race and just lengthened the gears by a couple of notches. I was lucky enough to follow Axel in the short 10 min qually session and realised that I still needed to go another 2 clicks on 6th gear to avoid over revving in slipstream.

I got a good start from around 6th on the grid and for a lap I was hoping to maybe get my tow rope onto Deans Ferrari. But Dave and Mike had other ideas and got between me and my target  . Another lap of hoping that Dave and Mike might tow us all up to the leading 2 cars and then I realised that the gap was getting too big and the battle for 3rd was slowing down any chance of drafting up to them.
Ok so my next option was to stick with Mike and Dave and try to sneak 3rd at the end.

The Honda is quite capable of running fast enough in the draft to stay with any car, but the moment that it pulls out to make a pass it is like someone puts the handbrake on!! Nippon Aerodynamics I guess? 

Mike and Dave managed to tangle at Curve Grande and suddenly I was alone in 3rd, and then in 2nd when Axel dropped out. Woohoo!! 2nd place looked almost certain if i made no mistakes....until Colin wound up his 6th gear  For lap after lap I watched the gap come down, trying to calculate if I had enough of a lead to hold on to 2nd.
With a lap to go that fast BRM swept past and I grabbed the tow...once last chance off the last banked bend but I would have to time my run perfectly...............I didn't !!  and Colin took a deserved 2nd place after a very rapid recovery.
I can't complain about getting 3rd place in the Honda as it is just not suited to this track, but 2nd would have been better 

[AnGex]

Well that was fun.

Can not say that myself. Getting out of the Race because on a mistake from someone else is not that funny...

[DLogan]

Can not say that myself. Getting out of the Race because on a mistake from someone else is not that funny...

I'm sure Axel feels the same way, but both incidents came about (IMO) because of silly, pointless bickering (seriously, blocking on Tribune? what's the point besides pissing me off?) over specific positions at a track that really isn't about that, and rarely rewards such behaviour.

Monza (classic, pre-chicanes) is all about the draft, and 10K even more so. Yes, everyone's heard that, but watching yesterday's race shows how few were listening.

Being 4th or 8th into 2nd Lesmo on lap 2 means NOTHING. Read that again. And again. Read it until it's sunk in. What matters is which pack you're in. From then until the final run through the last corner and to the line, your job is to just stay with that pack, help it move forward if you can. DON'T be slowing others in that pack down for no benefit (ooh I'm first into Para lap 15 because of a silly outbraking dive that made everyone else lock up and scrub speed thru the apex, yay for me) because that just moves you all backwards.

Dave not sticking to the right (where my draft was) on the way to Ascari on lap 1 cost the rest of you any chance at staying in the lead pack, hence any chance of winning (unless both Cookie and I fell away). As soon as I saw how far back the rest of you were when I was braking for Para, it was "right on, now work with Cookie to increase that gap as much as possible ASAP in case either of us run into trouble later maybe we'll have some wiggle room or even a chance to pit for a splash-and-go if needed, save our fight for lap 20 when it matters". Even with him not fully cooperating (though I'd tried to make emphatically clear that I had no intention [or capability, tbh] of trying to lose him), it worked good enough to give me my first UKGPL Pro win.

Yes, it's tainted by lap 13, and always will be. But I've watched the replay many times, and... I'm taking it.

[Cookie]

Dean I had the same intention and had well understood your tactics,
so I thought you had backed off before Para and I can take the usual fast line from outside to inside

Remember I had waited for you some laps before when you had troubles into Para...

IMO a misunderstanding, but the next time I will not wait for you  

PS
if you want to see a perfect cooperation working, watch Robert and me at Spa67 in our BT7s 

[DLogan]

...I thought you had backed off before Para and I can take the usual fast line from outside to inside ...

After you'd gone from inside to outside then back inside then alllll the way to the outside on the straight leading there, I really didn't know what you were thinking. So if you're doing silly defenses, I'll do silly attacks. Take all my track away when I'm doing a silly outbraking attack, and there we are.

I waited, too. Mild swearing occurred when it was obvious you weren't following.

[Cookie]

It seems we don't speak the same racing language,  
it was obvious that you were slowing me down with your overtaking before some fast corners,
so I wanted to show you that I keep the outside line down to Para...

I just looked into the replay,
you were definately lifting throttle before me and so I thought I can do my normal line!

[Phil Thornton]

I've loaded the chassis the drivers used into the token calculator spreadsheet.  For the next race the available tokens will be as declared in the table below (the table will also appear in the next race announcement).  The calculated values are automated but selecting the cars is a manual process so please check your tokens to make sure I haven't made a silly error.  There was no token overspend for this round so no one is disqualified.

Available Tokens:
Note: These are the tokens available to each driver before the 10 tokens are added for making the race start.

Driver	Tokens	Status
AnGex	3	Pro
bagrupp	11	Pro
Cookie	18	Pro
DLogan	16	Pro
Doni Yourth	37	Pro
EvilClive	13	Pro
Robert Fleurke	24	Pro
Gareth	10	Pro
Uli	10	Pro
MagicArsouille	5	Pro
Carlos Cendejas	5	Pro
Arf Arf Arf	5	Pro
GregT	7	Pro
dave curtis	39	Int
francesco	36	Int
miner2049er	38	Int
Phil Thornton	32	Int
Billy Nobrakes	46	Int
Jack O'Ferrall	40	Int