UKGPL Season 19 (2010) Novices Trophy (65) - Laguna Seca - May 4

[maddog]

What a terrific race!  I seemed to be in one battle or another from start to finish - it was nonstop!  Ok, technically, I do recall stopping to allow a select few cars past, whilst cooling my rubber at trackside ... 

Once again, an amazing qualy from Ross, which had me scratching my head for more speed, and 4th on the grid.  Saw nothing in the rules about not applying a dash of petrol to the tyres, (65 compounds weren't very sticky) and it must've helped, as I was 2nd by the 2nd corner.  There was only a blindingly fast Tim in front, who insisted on doing his Jim Clark impersonation at the worst of times - he was ahead!  My Bruce Mclaren was almost as good, but a brief horticultural adventure left me fighting only for second, for most of the race.

What a persistent bunch we Novices are - for a while there it was the Maestro I was fighting with, enhanced by a shadowing Norm, and then the performance was repeated with the Rock, doing his Mario Andretti (where did he come from) and making life hard, whilst Roger loomed.

At three quarters distance, we were suddenly closing in on Jim, or umm ... Tim, after his one grass-cutting escapade.  But t'was at about this point, I decided to turn my car around several times, to get a better look at our persuers.  It would've been nice to at least get a wave, as you lot were passing!  So maybe the petrol wasn't such a good idea - my tyres were completely shot!

I don't carry Pribluda on my car, but conjured up the Race history graph, in GPL Race Analyser. It's a great storyteller for those who've not yet tried it.

Anyway, some great racing witnessed from this seat, and another well-deserved p1er.  I think I'll join the queue.               

[Statmeister]

A double win for RogUK who claimed both the laptime consistency & the high climber prizes in the Statmeister competition. RogUK's average laptime deviation was 0.993 (with an average laptime of 1:14.606) while race winner Vosblod was only a whisker behind with 0.999. A perfect laptime consistency score here (e.g., 0.00 variation for 33 laps) would be 165.



* (P) in the Climber-Meister table denotes adjustment due to Moderator Penalty
** 0.00 in Consistency table denotes average laptime deviation > 5 secs cutoff
*** 2 worst scores to be dropped
 

[Statmeister]

And for this week's Stat-attack, we're taking a close look at how Novice pole times measure up with the Amateur's division.

The table below shows all the Novices pole position drivers & where their times would have put them on that season's Am's grid.

For example, Gilles27's pole at Laguna would have put him 9th (out of 12 total runners) on the Am's grid. Comparing the time difference between Am's & Nov's pole in seconds isn't very useful because of the huge variation in track lengths so I've included the difference in laptime expressed as a percentage of the Am's pole time (like the old 107% rule in F1) which allows a direct comparison.

[miner2049er]

Apologies for not having modded this yet. I usually try to have a race modded before the next round but I haven't had chance yet.

The only thing worse than the hours here is the pay