Grats to Fran on his first 66 win, and to Billy and Ziu.
Because we have had a break between seasons, I actually spent a little time doing offline practice as I felt that I had lost my way with setups on many of the cars. I recalled that the last time I ran the 66 Honda at Monza I was about 4 secs off the pace!!! So I started again and built a developed a whole new setup. It took about 20 laps but gradually I was getting things to where I wanted them to be. Things are not perfect, but I doubt that you can ever get a 100% perfect setup in GPL.
As normal I did qually on "race fuel" so I was confident that I could challenge all of those Ferraris. But I was concerned about the top speed of those red things and had geared for slipstreaming to protect my engine. A good start saw Bastian and myself get away quickly and I was easily able to stay with him. I made a mistake on lap 2 when I pulled out of the slipstream into Curve Grande and forced Bastian to go wide, which slowed both of us and allowed Axel to close the gap. I should have stayed behind Bastian and allowed him to maintain the pace and the gap back to Axel.
For the next few laps I allowed Bastian to run at his pace and simply short shifted behind him. Then he had a strange moment at Lesmo 1 when he simply slid sideways into the barriers ( his moment of lag probably explains that?). That left me ahead with a couple of seconds back to Axel.
I pushed hard for a few laps to keep Axel beyond any slipstream advantage until he must have gone off somewhere and suddenly I had a healthy lead.
It was about then that I looked at the fuel situation as I was cruising towards Parabolica with 22 laps still to race.
22 laps still to race and only 10.5 galls of fuel?? which indicated that I needed to use less than 0.5 galls per lap to get to the flag!!?? Immediately I started upshifting much earlier and taking corners in a higher gear, and then realised that I had to reduce top revs even more to get the fuel consumption down.
By now Fran was in 2nd place, but a long way behind and I was frantically trying to work out if he would catch me before the end of the race. Or, should I allow him to catch me and then use his slipstream to save fuel, maybe able to save enough to pass him on the last lap?? My brain was hurting!!
Gradually Fran got closer and closer and although I could easily have lapped 3-4 secs faster I just could not afford the fuel. When he caught me I tried sitting in his slipstream for a lap or two but that meant running higher revs, even with short shifting I was using too much fuel
and I had to back off even more.
With about 6 laps to go Billy and Ziu were closing fast and it was clear that I was not going to reach the finish and would be one lap short of fuel. The only good thing was that I might just be able to claim 4th as last of the finishers, When David dropped out with one lap to go I was safe in 4th and just managed to start the last lap before the engine coughed and died.
Still not quite sure how I screwed up the fuel by such a huge margin, I only had enough in the tanks for an indicated 17 laps, and with the Honda's thirsty V12 that probably gave me around 14 laps at full race pace. Clearly not enough for what we were supposed to do at Monza!!!
ALl of this is an excuse, To finish first, first you have to finish and I did not get there. Fran, Billy and Ziu did and deserved the champagne.