Another entertaining morning with the GTL fanatics.
This version of Lakeside was new to me, but I'm very familiar with the real thing, so was looking forward to this one.
Race 1: Mustang. From practice it was clear that Senad and his trusty Mini was on song, so I told the guys on TS that I "
planned to jump Senad at the start and see how long I could hold him up" (Lakeside is not a "passing" track, especially if you have some V8 grunt down the straights). Sure enough, all went to plan, for 10 laps anyway, as I had Senad buzzing around me like a pesky fly, but my loud pedal was bigger than his.
I was flogging the Stang pretty hard, knowing one small mistake would be enough for Senad, and eventually I obliged and off he went into the distance.
Later in the race, Bob was the next pesky Mini to harrass my big tail, but this time my tyres were in no mood to defend as vigourously. So I used a different strategy, camoflage, leaving a huge tyre smoke trail through the tight turns leaving Bob to wonder where I might be in there.
. Fortunately, the race ended one lap early, so Bob ran out of time to sneak by.
Race 2: Mini. My chance to be on the other end of this caper. Unfortunately, I made a complete hash of it. Blew the start and almost the entire field steamed past.
That quickly put Stuart (also in a Mini) and I behind Hans' Cortina, and he proved extremely hard to pass. I couldn't judge the braking points and lines of Hans and Stuart, and ended up taking emergency evasive action to avoid punting Stu a couple of times. One of those resulted in me scuttling over the sand at the dreaded turn 1 and heading for the tyres of doom. Somehow, I managed to keep it off the wall, but was now way behind. Later I was hauling in the Hans, Stuart, Knut train ahead, but went off again. I finally caught Hans again but couldn't find a way past (now I know how Senad felt in Race 1) and eventually ran out of road trying to go around the outside of Hans, this time hitting the fence. After that, it became somewhat lonely, so I spent the time trying to see how fast the Mini could take some of the turns, only to go past the ragged edge a couple of times.
Grats to Senad for winning everything today, you were on fire.
.
All good fun, thanks Knut for choosing one of my favourite tracks (good to be on an Aussie track
), and thanks to all who joined and made it enjoyable.
