You got it in one Matt.
As is the case most weeks I had done little in the way of practice, but the BMW was the first car off the transporter during the practice session and once I had tweaked the setup a little I could see the possibility of a no stop race. The rest of the preparation time was spent trying to work out the strategy.
I soon became apparent to me ( and my lack of driving finesse) that running higher ratios to get to 29 laps was just too marginal on fuel. The tyres looked like they would make it with a little care.
So the plan was to run the gearbox ratios that would give me some decent performance and comfortably reach 24 laps on a tankful of gas, then stop for just 25 litres of fuel and no tyres. Brilliant plan.......poorly executed!!!
The early laps were encouraging as I kept Paul, Tony and almost Matt in sight and each lap that they were visible played in to my strategy. I picked up a cut track on Lap 2 I think after I got sucked into one of the chicanes in my eagerness to stay with the pack. But it all fell apart at around half distance when I forgot how to drive the ruddy thing for 2 laps, probably distracted by cars going into the pits on HUD. 2 cut tracks and SnG !! and that really screwed everything. that lost 25+ secs killed any chance of sneaking past Matt and made catching Tony and Paul a much bigger challenge.
After my very quick Splash and Dash I was trying too hard to maintain the speed and with some very iffy tyres ran wide and got another SnG, game over. Just to cap it all I also picked up a speeding in pitlane on the last stop
.
Paul did a DNF after some hard work hassling Tony and if he had kept trundling would have caught and passed me in my multiple pitstops.