Server 2
Defo agreed with Gary on the format being a good one and action packed - top banana Andrew ... and there being 3 races means that if anyone suffers any kind of game or human errors or discos, they are able to get a couple of rounds and still have a great night.
Race 1
Quali - landed 3rd, despite being 0.5sec slower than I had gone in practice.
Got a reasonably good start, was up behind Marty and Gary who were scrapping, but every time I got in front of em,
I got blue flagged, ignored em, but when the third warning came, I had to throttle off and let Gary and Marty back past :sad: ... but slowed a bit too much in doing so and they got a bit of a gap on me. I could see Gary and Marty fighting, so pushed to get up to them when suddenly Marty disappeared (DQ, blue flag
).
Anyway, I was now in 2nd and had Paulo paying me some serious attention fro behind, but I managed to hold him at around 1.3 seconds for a good few laps when I think he made a slight mistake gracing me a bit more gap prior to disappearing due to his mother's phonecall (see his earlier post).
So, with a gap to Nigel of over 4.5 seconds and growing, I started trying to claw some of Gary's lead back, and it seemed to be working ... to my surprise I got down to within 0.5 seconds of him when suddenly I noticed I had miscalculated my fuel intake, and my fuel gauge was looking scarily low. Praying for the flag to drop we crossed the line one more time about a second apart, but no flag. :eek:
Now with only 1.1 litres of fuel left on board, and an average fuel consumption of 1.55 l/lap, I knew I really needed a bit of luck to make the finish. It was nearly 9 seconds back to Nigel in 3rd, so I started throttling it back, short shifting and coasting as much as I could.
I made it to the final turn with 0.02 litres of fuel left in the tank, gave it one kick on the throttle in second and the engine died ... Nigel had also run out of fuel, so
Yves rounded the final corner and
stole 2nd off me with probably only 10 metres left to the line ... I luckily had just enough momentum to roll across the line in third, and the car stopped 2 metres over the line. Most amusing way to end a thoroughly enjoyable race
Race 2
Praccy and quali: was averaging mid pack times for a while, not clicking with the setup and lap then suddenly at the end of quali I found my rythm and on one final flying lap landed 2nd (sorry Hermy
).
I got a pretty awful start cos of not practising hill starts with G25, and on the entry into T1 got a slight nudge which sent me way out wide ... scrabbling for grip I got back on the hunt but by the time things had settled I was in 7th place :doh:
David, Hansi and Hermy were in front, along with one or two others, but then a few of them spun so after avoiding their pirouetting cars, I was up into 5th, but now
with Keith's very close attention and we had some very cool laps together - thx for avoiding me too mate on some of those wilder attempts at scaring me into letting you past :wink2: - you did manage it several times too only to lose it again
Lots of dicing followed, not many passing places,
some great racing, Marty was also in the mix again, I finally got clear and was up behind Michael and David, but ran out of time so
finished a very respectable 4th. Another great race ... thx all
I unfortunately had the dreaded
nvdknl... graphics driver crash at Limerock during quali though, which basically went one better and took my whole system out ... so by the time I got things restarted it was too late to join and the race had already started - as the numbers had dwindled somewhat by this point, I also felt bad for the guys in the server ... sorry to depart at this point, but I really was looking forward to this one, especially after my form in races 1 and 2 :sad:
Thanks Andrew, RD and all the fellas on Server 2 ... great evening's entertainment, despite the cursed graphics driver crash.
Sorry ... a bit of a "war and peace" thing here, but shows how much fun just 2 races were for me tonight :clap::highfive::love2::victory:
