UKGPL Season 44 (Spring 2024) 1966 CA - Road America - Mar 19

[Phil Thornton]

..... those cars have the early new tyre-model of GPL and tend to sudden snap over when temps reach 80°.....

That explains a lot.

[Enrique Farina]

First of all, a big apology for my start yesterday in the race, I forgot for a moment that it was a rolling start, my wife was talking to me about something about a client 10 seconds before the flag went down, and that was what threw me off. for a few seconds.
   When I remembered I had already hit Greg and I'm very sorry Greg, it was an idiot of mine, fortunately you were able to continue and recover your starting position just like me...
   My god, my brain is getting old......
    A very good race with a relentless Yannick ahead and a Gregori who recovered his mistakes very well and left me in 3rd position, with 10 laps left, I started to make several small mistakes since my left front tire was red hot, and he passed me in the braking references, causing Evil to catch up with me with 3 laps remaining, I defended my bronze medal with my teeth, and in the last lap I realized that when braking for turn 4 he was very close to me when I started to brake, and I blocked the wheels to the right, so as not to hit myself and I managed it, but it went into the sand and lost precious time, what a shame that fight for the 3rd place was to rent a balcony.....great race evil congrats also
    congratulations yannick and gregory, very strong, yours.

[GrandPrixYannick]

Quiet a fun outing. Highlight for me is powersliding my car a little through the Caroussel. Works wonderfully with the CanAm '66 cars!

The car felt rather edgy in the braking zone especially, so I went with pretty soft dampers for this one.

I haven't really noticed what happened at the start but I did see Enrique and Greg's name suddenly drop off from my Pribluda's Track Position. Seeing this I decided to slow down to rough 80 mph to get them a little more time to restore the grid. From there on it was standard procedure.

I drove at relegated pace throughout most of the event, avoiding mistakes and make sure the braking was pretty cozy.
It wasn't until I noticed Greg was pushing with approx. 6 laps remaining that I began to push harder in order to maintain the gap.

Thanks for racing guys, well done to the podium!

[EvilClive]

Grats to the podium of Lola's.  decided to try the Chapp 2E as I had not driven it before, the thought of only 2 gears had always put me off the car.

Surprisingly, once I got my head around the 2 gears and made some major changes to the set up in order to make the car more compliant it all felt quite good.
After the drama of the start  I was quite happy cruising along behind Enrique until after 3-4 laps it was clear that both Enrique and Greg were definitely struugling with the brakes. I could also see a few puffs of tyre smoke from Yannick's car. Hmmm??? maybe I can gain a few places here?? I think it was about this time that Greg went off?

I started closing up on Ricky's car and applying a little pressure and felt sure that I could be faster if I could just get past. But then, braking for T4 Ricky got a little out of shape just when I was planning to go deep and maybe try a pass on the exit.  I had to go wide to avoid his rear end and lost load of time. Fortunately I had a big gap back to the next car and could rejoin without losing a place. Then my Prib said that Axel was closing fast?? and when he caught  up he was "on a mission" to pass. It was strange that suddenly Axel had found 2secs a lap??
Later the name on Prib miraculously changed to Greg??!! which explained the super pace, but I think using a disguise like that is not sportsmanlike  lol.

I could keep Greg and Ricky just in sight but to close the gap would involve taking a lot more risks, so I waited for a mistake.

Then with about 7 laps to go the gap to Enrique was halved..... and I caught sight of him more anf more often, so I upped my pace and the gap started to close quite quickly. Until with 3 laps to go I was on his tail and it was clear that he was struggling with the brakes with lots of locked wheels.
Just as I was thinking about making a challenge we arrived at T4  again  . This time I wanted to take a wide line but put one wheel into the gravel and screwed up my braking completely.
Not too disappointed in getting the 2E up to 4th place and to post a lap only a few hundredths behind Gregs FL. It looks like I will have to start using the Lola soon and I need to get a handle on those brakes lol.

[EvilClive]

BTW  I had a strange anomaly during quali which I don't believe I have experienced before.

After around 20 mins of quali, I had a sudden CTD..........nothing all that unusual but still a little annoying.

But, when I tried to rejoin through IGOR all went well right up until the very last moment and I got the message "Track not installed"??!! Clearly it was as I had just done 20 minutes on that track and on the same server??
Several attempts all gave the same result. So with around 10mins of quali remaining, I downloaded a fresh copy of the track, deleted the existing install and created a new track file.
Restarted the PC, restarted GPL and GEM, added the track to the 66 Can Am Season and entered the server via IGOR.

I was then able to join the server again, fortunately my quali laps were preserved and I kept 4th spot on the grid.

I just cannot understand how I got the CTD and "track not installed" unless something corrupted the track file whilst in use???