Well, my races were born from pure opportunism
Due to work, equiping the GF's new van, the new pedals, and the GF's birthday all going off together over the last week or so I went into this with zero practice
And as such I was purely in damage limitation mode as these races are so competitive I had no reason to expect to be a front runner without setup time in advance...
I spent most of practice playing with a Medium tire setup until it could keep pace with Jos - who had joined before me and was putting in some sterling times also on mediums.
As first Kai, and then Matteo and Fabri got involved I found myself pretty much there for race pace.
With 5 to go I switched to Softs and made 1 or 2 minor changes to make the setup more aggressive, I didn't put a lap together in practice but could see in my split times I was in the right ball park.
In qually I did well but never managed to hit my predicted lap, which was basically the same as the one's put in by Fabri and Matteo.
At the end of qualifying I was lucky enough to spot an unexpected piece of information from pro-tires; Apparently it had decided that my softs would last until lap 22 before going into the red zone - only 2 laps less than the mediums were showing.
In the end I mentally tossed a coin and decided on s*** or bust.
I loaded Softs and determined I'd do my best not to excite them too much in the race, while also harrassing the hell out of the Alfas in the early stage while I had the advantage.
In race 1 this went fantastically, I even managed a clean pass on Matteo - but then messed up slightly and cooked my tires catching the big slide I had to perform in order to avoid crashing.
This both put me into Fabri's reach and also knocked my right rear into yellow status.
Oddly the Softs are very strange because the car handled terribly from that point until the other rear tire went yellow and I lost loads of time (This happened in race 2 also).
Once all 4 tires were yellow I had almost the same pace as when green
and could maintain and slightly pull away from Fabri, once Matteo backed out of it to secure a finish my run to the flag was fairly stress free (Aside from having no idea how long my tires would keep on working).
For race 2 I decided to run the softs again and lucked out massively when Matteo and Fabri got 'a bit close'.
Once Syd was a few seconds back I calmed down a bit to ensure the tires weren't over-abused, but then Kai appeared behind and seemed to have fitted warp engines!
Luckily his advance started just as I was getting out of the weird green/yellow handling phase and was rapidly able to start increasing my lap speeds to hold him off at between 2 and 3 seconds for most of the remaining laps.
I'm going to try my new pedals with the hard springs over the weekend if I have time, but with a proper calibration in place I have to say I'm getting the hang of them at medium strength. A slightly stiffer spring should stop the momentary lockups during heal and toeing that Fabri mentioned in his post, or at least I hope so!
