Great race guys!
Most of you probably already know, I ran into an interesting problem during qualifying. I think somewhere in the middle of qualifying I lost an information connection with the server. It never finished qualifying for me and the server didn't know I was actually racing.
I was a little bummed because I had actually thought I had pole because I had the fastest time before the info connection was lost! It was a good thing that we had a rolling start since I joined the rest of you in my qualifying position. The race for me was rather uneventful, I went with mediums and I was kinda cautious for the first lap or so because I didn't want to screw up and total my car with the new damage system! Dealing with the server problem also was in the back of my mind and I didn't really get my head into the race until maybe the third lap.
With my relatively slow start, Chris and Chris had a couple of second advantage by the end of the first lap and I noticed that I had a gap behind me by the 3rd or 4th lap. I got a bit cautious coming up on some back markers and didn't realize that they probably didn't know I was lapping them. Because of the server problem I think the server had me listed as running last. Next time I need to announce over TS a little bit earlier I'm about to lap someone (heh I usually don't get too many chances to lap anyone so I'm not used to it!
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The gap behind me got smaller when I reached the slower cars, and eventually Ronny blew by me. For the rest of the race, it was just trying to maintain consistent lap times and to keep the car on the track. I wasn't going to catch the leaders, and it looked like I had a safe margin to those behind me.
The tire temp app I had running showed I had 97% tread on the front right, and 98% on the others....BUT I really don't think those numbers are accurate. I wasn't able to push hard with the tires towards the end. The tires seemed to have lost a lot of grip at that point, even though the track should have been rubbered in pretty well. The guy who is supporting the app has noticed this also ("the tyre wear is sometimes difficult to interpret (A value of 97% has quite a noticeable amount of grip loss already"). Hards was probably a better choice for the race, but we're all still trying to learn things with the new update
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Just want to say to all of you that it was nice to see a bunch of you hanging out on TS afterwards to chat a bit. Sometimes it is good to have a debrief from everyone and you get to learn new things. I'm not that knowledgeable about racing as many of you are, and I learn things just about every race just in the chat. Last night was no different.
I was surprised just how much faster the GT3 cars seemed compared to my GT2. Ronny just flew up and flew by me on the Kemmel Straight. It was mentioned in the chat that the GT3 cars have much better aero and have a faster top speed than many of the GT2 cars. I went with a relatively low downforce in my car because I thought the GT2 cars would have a higher top speed, but I was in a lose/lose situation here because I didn't have as much grip in the corners, and STILL didn't have higher speed even at lower rear wing. Going to have to go with more downforce next time
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Pardon my long post, I can tend to ramble along too much at times
I posted on the AC forum about my server connection problem and they are looking into it. It may be a rare situation....I just hope it doesn't happen again
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