Well, that was interesting
I'll be honest - I only ran this combo as we'd often wondered about what racing them would be like and the new Road America had just come out.
I'm glad I did and actually a bit surprised at the turn out, I know a few were unable to make it but expected a few more to try it none the less.
Qualifying went horribly wrong for me as on my full flying lap I managed a massive lock-up into turn 3, I was 1.5 seconds under my previous best at that point and still needed to scrub at least half a second to catch Max's blistering time. I knew instantly I had no chance so just pulled over and parked it as there wasn't enough time left to start a new lap.
The race start almost went my way - I'd reduced my boost to 40% to make launching easier. It worked awesomely for the first 50 meters, then I mistakenly thought that the road had caught up with my rear wheels and floored it properly
Most of you probably watched me spear off into the pit wall at a good 70-80mph like a proper idiot
That left me with an orange nose and yellow rear wing on the damage display and also gave the slow starting Max time to re-pass me for first.
Both of us (and about half the grid) then proceeded to run wide in T1 due to the cold tires and we commenced what would likely have been a silly hard battle.
Sadly Max ran wide in the 2nd half of the lap and managed to put a wheel on the grass while giving it beans again to try and get up to speed again behind me.
From that point on I was lapping on my own and generally taking it fairly easy, about 15 minutes in I found the car had changed in handling enough I could now run 2nd gear through T2 more easily - that alone gave a gain of half a second every lap
A few laps later I carried way too much speed into the final turn and found myself missing the apex by a good 50 meters and ending up in the middle of the field.
I think that's what Stefan calls 'waiting for us'
At various points through the fuel burn I'd find the car had changed enough to force me to drive it differently, nearly every instance involved a marked increase in pace. Until the tires started to go off around the 30 minute mark that is.
My fastest lap of the race was my last as I turned the boost up to full, I was nearly a second ahead of my race pace by T1 thanks to the daft power and nearly exhausted fuel - but the tires were so far gone that I lost most of it by T2.
I think I only knocked about .3 seconds off by the end of the lap. How much of this was thanks also to my aero damage I'll never know.
Congrats to Stefan on 2nd and Mark on 3rd.
Well done to all finishers - I think that was probably the hardest race I've done in AC with regards to actually keeping the car under control.
Bad luck to Max on the multi-spin!
