rF2 [Night Race] Mazda 787B @ Grand Valley - Wed May 26th 2010

[Gary Lennon]

Pah,sorry Chris m8,but you will also become old and confused and miss vital information too some day . (guilty,i have been known to be a cheeky old get on numerous previous occasions) .

 

[Mattia Gottardi]

was a nice but hard night for me.......i think that my setup wasn't the best, other cars pass me on the straight like a rocket, and they were fast also in the other parts of the track.......my best speed was 286-290 km/h...... but it doesn't matter......

lap 1 i found Gary in the tunnel......was breaking and was trying to pass on the right behind another car, but i was tapped in my back and so i spun into Gary sry m8, but couldn't avoid that contact

.....i didn't lose many time, and so i started again my race, but in lap 3 or 4 i don't remeber well, while i was behind Valerio, one car in front of us went wide, Valerio braked a bit and i was too much near his back and not so focused and so i tapped him.....spun and waited for his rejoin.....i lost really a lot of time...

after that disaster was really hard take back the pace and the concentration....did few wide but after few laps i refound my concentration and i started to come back to the group...did some nice fights with some gentlemen on the track. (maybe video will come if i found some time.......in the night is really spectacular)

my strategy was to do a first long stint (40 minuts) and a short one in the end, because for me was more easy have a light cars with fresh tyres in the last part of the race when you are a bit tired. I chose to change only front tyres and so i spared some seconds.... it was enough for found me in 5th position. In the last laps Toby had some problems and so i finished the race behind him at few second in front!!!!

Was really a nice race.....it was hard for the problems in the first laps, that maybe cost me some nice fights for the podium, but it was really a nice race overall....

was my first one in the night and so i was a lot exciting for it!!!

thank you again Ryan and Racedepartment and congratz to the podium and to the guys that take at home the car!!!!

 

[Adam Eggbeer]

Decent night for me in the end.

In quali I went at least 3 seconds faster than I had done in offline practice so was very happy with it, although I could of perhaps gone quicker if I didn't keep making mistakes. Was 12 of 14 which was higher than I was expecting.

The formation lap was weird as we kept having to speed up and slow down all the time at the back. 1st lap I managed to get past Mattia on the straight before I went slightly wide in turn 1. Managed to avoid the incident at the tunnel but may of been the guy that spun Mattia, if it was I apologise, I would of waited but at the time I didn't think I had hit you. Can got ahead of me in the tunnel and I basically made my goal in the race to beat him as we had similar pace. We kept overtaking each other due to mistakes by the other one all just from clean racing. Went into turn 6 on one of the early laps and Ryan "Night Fox" Callan came out of nowhere and slid one up the inside out of nowhere. I checked the time gap out of turn 2 and saw I had 1.6 seconds over him so wasn't expecting him to be on my tail right then but luckily saw him at the last minute and avoided the accident. A few laps later got hit in the rear by Lee but he waited for me to recover. I was now about 7 seconds behind Can and needed to push to catch him up. Eventually got past again when he ran wide at turn 6. A couple of laps further and another incident into turn 6 where I took to the inside to defend against Gary but on entry I got a hit in the left front wing which spun the car around. Lost 3 places due to that spin and was back behind Can. Caught him up again but he entered the pits before I had chance to overtake and I then realised I needed to put in some good laps to get past with tyres that had gone off on lap 7. Eventually made my pitstop (must of been one of the last ones) and rejoined 10 seconds ahead of Can. From there on I just looked after the car and had one minor spin towards the end. Nick came out from his 2nd? stop just ahead but immediately blew away into the distance and opened up a 30 second gap. A couple of minutes from the end, he had a problem and fell back which allowed me to take a surprising 7th.

Thanks to Ryan, RD, and all the guys I battled with.

 

[Konstantin Nagovicin]

Good race!

I wrote a post about the race with screenshots. My blog. Click translate to the bottom panel and Photos to see the screenshots.

 

[Mattia Gottardi]

don't worry adam!!! i saw that you hit me only from the replay, and in my opinion was a really soft tap (enough for made my car spin, but it was only because the situation was really difficult), and it was a race accident because you can't really doing nothing for that!! this things happens during race so it doesn't matter!!! btw thx for you sorry!!!