I was feeling totally knackered even before the race started and found maintaining concentration extremely difficult. Even in qualifying I was struggling to hook up a decent lap and was losing time everywhere, so 4th on the grid was far better than I deserved.
The Waza procession of the grid was kind of satisfying ( 1-2-3-4 you don't see everyday!!!
) and I was relieved when we all made it through T1. I deliberately left a "safety" gap between Tim's car and mine just to avoid any team mate tangles in the early stages, but I may have given too much of a margin and lost any tow on the straight. Even so, the Waza train eased slowly away from the green things behind
Just as she had instructed
My concentration just was not there and I was just cruising around in 4th. In fact it took about 10 laps before it registered that Tim had quietly extended his lead over me to about 10 secs
. I upped the pace and started to reel Tim in until I was within about 2 secs and then the single overworked brain cell malfunctioned again, and a couple of dumb mistakes lost some more time.
I think my efforts to regain that time and poor concentration must have delivered a couple of dodgy downshifts somewhere because the engine expired when only at about 50% revs exiting T1 a few laps later.
To be honest it was almost a relief to be able to quit as I was not functioning and if I had got into any sort of dicing situation I'm sure I would have caused someone some grief
Grats to newbie Waza on his win and great pace....just a shame you could not use a proper car to do it with
and to the podium and all finishers...that was one long race!!
