Grats to John and Hristo for a solid drive into the top spots plus congratulations to all who finished from both teams....and commiserations to Sam and Jethro for bad luck.
We might have to review our invitations to GBGPL as they get closer to beating us every time we race
.lol Well done Bosse and Roo for pacing themselves to the podium, another finisher in the top half of the field would have taken the victory.
But for me, that race was a struggle of mammoth proportions!!
After the "server" problems and late start I did not have the heart to ask for an IP address. So I joined VROC knowing that my steering gremlin would be hyper active.
I gave up any chance of a good qually time and just tried to adjust the race setup to at least allow me some chance of completing the 14 laps ( a challenge in a Honda at the best of times!!)
From the start I was ultra cautious and allowed the field to spread out in front of me before increasing the pace on lap 2 or 3.
There was no point in trying to "race" anyone with "random directional compensatory mode" in operation as any hint of a slide could not be "corrected" with opp lock. Even with my cautious approach and laps around 3:22 at best I still manged about 4 or 5 major spins, but suffered only minor damage, which given the problems I already had, were as nothing.
Cars fell out and I followed the changing fortunes at the head of the field on Prib as different names appeared ..and went. GBGPL seemed to have a stranglehold on the top places and my display did not give me all of the "mid table" drivers, so I could not be sure exactly where each team was in terms of points.
I had a very steady Will Tway behind me and Fulvio and Tim some way in front. So there was no point in risking anything too adventurous to pass teammates so I concentrated on keeping going and saving the engine.
One of my rather spectacular spins through Stavelot allowed Will to get past and by the time I had got going again, and cooled the tyres so that you did not need Ray Bans just to look at them, he was some 10 secs up the road and still motoring.
I was now last and somewhat disheartened, but at least I had not been lapped
so I upped the rev limit of 10500 and checked oil temps down the straight to Masta for a few laps and was encouraged to see that everything was cool
and that Will was getting closer.
I finally caught Will with about 4 laps to go and thought that maybe I could "take" him. I was following him into Stavelot and maybe it was the tow or ?? , but the tail started to slide and with no way of correcting with opp lock, we performed another smoking spin, but miraculously avoided the hard metal bending stuff yet again.
Will was heard cheering and chuckling in the distance and I knew that barring a mistake from him or running out of fuel, that was it... last place .
I thought at the time that GBGPL had enough top places to be secure with a points win, but thought I would at least get the whale to the finish and score some points. Turns out that they might have been some very valuable points as we only just took the points victory.
Big thanks to GBGPL for a great race and apologies for the confusion at the start over servers.
