Clive, I think Dimitar's changes to my v1c2 setup made it even better, so perhaps you should have tried his for qualifying. It's what I did, although I changed the tyre pressures to the maximum. This proved to be a mistake eventually, as it made handling in the corners quite troublesome. The car was quick thanks to the higher top speed on the straights, but it wasn't worth as much as I thought it would be. Maybe something in the middle between his pressures and the maximum would have been optimal?
My race was quite eventful! After going just a tenth slower than Dimitar in qualifying, I was optimistic because of the slipstream, but a slow start made me have some doubts that I had already lost him before the straight. Fortunately the high pressures and slipstream did their job and I was back in first, but now he was pushing very hard behind, braking later for most of the corners and carrying a bit more speed through them as well.
He overbraked himself before Indianapolis after catching my slipstream, went off and hit the wall, thus he had some damage already before the end of lap 1. On lap 2 we exchanged positions on the straight, but going through the hairpin side by side allowed Erling to catch up a little bit. Then DD made a mistake in the last chicane and for a moment I thought maybe I braked too early, so I slowed down to wait 1-2 seconds, but had to continue as Erling had caught up with me.
He was very quick on the straight, so I assume he had higher pressures as well. This produced some fine racing with exchange of positions and it also helped us pull away from Dimitar who was now 5 seconds behind, but he would quickly recover a second and a half through the twisty bits, only to see it go back up to 5 down the straights.
I was just preparing yet another attack when I lost the car on the exit of T3, spinning around violently. This caught DD by surprise and he forgot to brake for T4, crashing into the outside barriers. I managed to continue, but was now 6 seconds behind Erling, with Geoff some 14-15 more behind.
We had pretty much the same pace for the next few laps, but as I was pushing too hard to make up the gap, I clipped the wall on the outside of the fast right left combination near the end of the lap and flipped over. It took forever for the car to stop and reset itself, but then as I accelerated I saw Geoff coming full speed towards me! Turns out the game reset me facing the wrong direction!
This lost me some extra time trying to turn the car around and by the time I went going again, Geoff was about 8 seconds ahead. The damage I had from the incident was pulling the car to the side a bit and I also noticed that my straight line advantage was now gone, with Erling pulling away on the long straight (judging from the time gap). Luckily I still seemed to have enough speed to keep up with Geoff, so I put my head down and pushed as hard as I could.
Although the gap quickly went down to 5-6 seconds, Geoff seemed to have found his pace and from there one we were pretty evenly matched for most of the remaining laps, with a few tenths gained here and there, bringing the gap down to 4 seconds with 3 laps to go. Suddenly I saw Geoff right in front of me, as he had an off in that terrible slow right hander before the final sector, so now the gap was less than 2 seconds with just 2 laps to go!
Geoff was quickly back into rhythm and was actually pulling away in some parts of the track, so I had to take bigger risks in the corners that I noticed I'm slightly quicker. On the penultimate lap I was not close enough to catch his slipstream, and then just as I had closed up before the start of the final lap, he went quicker through the chicane and the gap slightly increased again. I just had to take the first section before the straight as best as possible, but massive understeer in T1 didn't help with that. Fortunately T2 through T4 were far better, probably the best I took them the whole race, so I was just over a second behind Geoff as we accelerated up the long straight.
Initially it didn't seem like I was going to make it, but slowly slowly the gap was closing down and once the slipstream effect increased, I realized I was in with a chance! I caught up to him just before the fast right and made my move on the inside before the braking zone. Had he covered the inside there, it would have probably been over, but I guess his plan was to attack back on the following straight. Unfortunately this didn't happen, as he went too wide on the exit of the hairpin and lost a lot of time on acceleration.
All that long slipstream, plus pushing hard in the reminder of the lap, gave me the fastest lap, so that and 2nd place were satisfactory enough.
All in all very happy with the result, despite not winning. Erling deservedly won with his amazing consistency (watch DD's video as he shows Erling's lap times at some point, most of them in the 1:16s) and lack of big mistakes, so congrats to him! Congrats to Geoff as well for discovering his pace during the race and making it interesting until the very end. Commiserations to Dimitar for retiring, it would have been better if he was involved in the battle for longer.
Grats to everyone else for surviving until the end! Despite the difficult car/track combination and the high damage setting of the car, it's surprising that we didn't have more retirements.