@ Tom: No harm done, where would we be without my obligatory spin and car damage in early stages!!??!!
All you did was give me 25 seconds of repairs and a car whose forcefeedback vibrated like crazy for two whole laps, that explains why I couldn't keep pace anymore, lost about 1.5s per lap. No matter, track itself is still lots of fun, didn't mind I wasn't racing anyone (Dave was behind me but I knew with a limping car like mine it was just a question of time before the inevitable happened which it did, right in front of him at penultimate corner where I completely lost it (lap 17 or so), ruined some more body parts and front right tyre. Luckily it all happened right in front of the pits which were planned a lap later anyway so it was no biggie.
@ Jorgen: at the time you were behind me in the later stages of the race (just prior to your disco) - data showed you were one lap behind me so I let you unlap yourself - did you get and blue flag warnings? Was kind of funny, myself trying to catch Spanner (I was on fresh rubber) but you weren't fast enough to pull out a lead on me, so I was worried you'll get one blue flag too many and get a drive through.
Anyway, quali was so-so, should be at least 3/4 of a sec faster, but no matter, guys in front were aliens (except for Spanner
). What I did do AFTER quali ruined the race anyway (that's without other disasters
): I was watching the track temperature in quali and it went straight to the top, +12 degrees in 20 mins or so. (Dumb) Logic told me race will be the same so I acted accordingly and lowered the tyre pressure. Big, big, BIG mistake (was running medium/hard in race trim, quali on med-med), race tyres were sooooo cold. Fronts never reached more than 194kPa, rears were at 194-195 tops. Add plenty of broken aero parts for most of the race and thus even lower temperatures since I couldn't push to heat them up... classic catch 22 and highly frustrating.
Race engineer half-saved my day, she proposed med-med in second stint, we were even discussing soft-med but decided it would be too risky, fearing we'd fry left-front. In retrospective (medium rears were quite decent if not perfect in 2nd stint, and that's on "hard tyre" pressure, so you can imagine how underinflated hards were in the first stint:D) we should have taken soft-med, I'm pretty sure it would last the distance.
Had a great setup to be honest but it was highly sensitive to any changes so we shouldn't have touched the original tyre pressure anyway...
Live and learn.
Great track, great race.
GTCs - you're too polite.
