I certainly made it harder than it needed to be, but joker still maximized.
An hour before the race I cut my right thumb. Not a good omen of things to come. I drove the race with a bandage on the thumb, but other then trying to come off while I was racing, it didn't bother me too much. Then while I was trying to join the server, my Quest 2 started to act, it was constantly losing tracking, I barely managed to click to switch to rift mode and get into AC. But since tracking wasn't working, if I moved in my chair, the world (car) was moving with me, not my head moving around the car as it normally would be.
On the server I saw I was the only 917, so the pressure was on to not make any mistakes and win, as the car is by far the best.
Qually went good and I was easily on pole.
Fuel calculations were showing me that I could do 20 laps on the full tank, so I thought I just needed another 15 laps of fuel, because the race was 35 laps, right? I could have sworn I read it was 35 laps. But after the start, I saw it was 36 laps! So when pitting I needed to figure out where my pit controls were to increase the fuel. Except I wasn't sure were they were? If they weren't mapped to the wheel buttons, I was screwed. I guess I'll find out when pitting. All that time Max was doing excellent job keeping the pressure on in the early laps, only 1 second or so off my times. As the laps counted up, I realized another mistake I made. When I set up my pit strategy, I only set the fuel. I set to change the tires, but forgot to change default pressures. And those were definitely too low. So now I was debating, if I found pit controls, do I turn off tire change? Or do I go with new but underinflated tires?
As fuel went down, I built a good cushion over Max, but range was even shorter, I barely made it to lap 19, and went into the pits. I was frantically pushing buttons on my wheel as I was rolling toward the pit stall, and luckily pit controls were there. I stopped just before the stall to adjust the fuel, adding 5 or so litters, and I went with new tires. I lost a few seconds while stopped there before pitting properly. And then proceeded to stay and stay in the pits. Afterwards I calculated I lost around a minute and a half in total for pitting. I exited in third behind Max and Mark J. Mark was close by and I almost caught him by the end of lap 20, but he went into pits. I wasn't sure how far ahead was Max, as there were several cars between us. But on lap 22 he stopped and exited around 8 seconds behind me. Despite my low pressured tires I was doing ok, but then with 10 laps to go I noticed I had fuel for 9.6 more laps
I didn't put enough at the stop. Since I couldn't afford a quick splash of fuel pitstop, with Max being so close, I proceeded to short shift and save fuel. It wasn't until two laps to go when I finally saw 2 .1 laps of fuel left and knew I was safe.
Then on the last lap I stupidly thought let's try to set the fastest lap and almost went off at Eau Rouge
So what looked fairly straight forward from the outside, was all drama for me.
Congrats to Max who was really fast and made sure I couldn't afford any mistakes, and to vva for rounding out the podium.
Now back to earth for the next race
