Great race for me, really intense with battles for most of the laps.
Qualified on pole and got away well but I somehow took the Toe in 3rd, didn't realise it and wondered why I had no acceleration off the corner until it was too late and Oliver took the lead after a could of side-by-side corners. When we got into traffic Oliver was able to make a better job of it and pulled out a few seconds whilst I found myself dropping back with the chasing pack. Jamie was clearly running lower df than most of the rest of us and he breezed past on the straight. After that I was stuck between Jamie and Karsten and, realising that I wasn't going to get past Jamie with his higher top speed, I decided to short pit on lap 15 some 8 laps early. Not sure it was a sensible strategy or not really, but I guess it sort of worked. By the time the others had pitted some laps later I was in 2nd but only because Jamie had crashed, whilst Oliver was well ahead and Karsten was right back on my tail
. I was on lower fuel than them now though and I was able to eat into Oliver's lead and gap Karsten by a few seconds but I knew this was illusory since my second stop would need to be longer than theirs. Indeed, after the second round of stops Oliver was now 20 seconds ahead and guess who was filling my mirrors again....
It looked like the battle with Karsten was going to continue to the end but all of a sudden he had gone and I was clear in 2nd. Finally a chance to relax and boy did I need it, my body isn't used to racing for more than an hour. Then a lap later and I saw Oliver was in the pits. Hadn't a clue what had happened and thought maybe he had sped during his stop or something and was serving a black flag. It took me another lap until I realised he must have wrecked and I could just cruise to the end. Bad luck there Oliver, you had the race in the bag for sure up to then.
Traffic was interesting. A few hairy moments but those mostly seemed to arise when a GT driver was trying to be helpful but just created confusion. Helpful is good but not so much when we have to guess how they are going to be helpful
. I managed to bring the car home without damaging the paintwork so I hope I didn't cause too many problems for the GTs.
With Baz bringing his car home in 6th it was a great start for TWFR. Let's see if we can maintain the momentum at Sebring!
