Anyway - the races.
Race 1 - Escort - Track -Ricard 88.
Man, do I lurves the Escort. I chose the Escort purely because I love the lightness, the deftness of the handling. I was a bit surprised to see it as head and shoulders quickest in the group, me & Amir being P2 & pole respectively.
Maybe it would have been closer if there hadn't been the Lap 1 turmoil (no more said about this - it's been done to death already) but Amir & I seemed to scamper away fairly easily. We had a few great laps, Amir pulling out to 1.5 sec, me closing up to 0.5, him pulling out again, me closing up again - really nice racing :good:
I seem to be getting into this bad habit of driving OK, quick-ish & smooth-ish, closing up or keeping in touch, and then for some reason deciding to push that extra bit harder, and it very rarely turns out well. This happened twice in this race, and the second time, it spoiled it for both me & Amir. First time, at the T1 Esses, I decided to get on the accelerator way too early and caused a wobble, Amir opened up to a 4 sec lead in that one corner. :doh: I slowly started closing (really slowly, but closing nonetheless), but then in the last corner, after I'd closed up to about 2 sec, could see Amir really close, I again tried to boot it too soon rather than keeping on in the style that I was using to close, and this time it was a full on spin - race over in terms of competition, which was a shame.
Pretty quiet for the rest of the race finishing P2.
Race 2 - CSL Schnitzer - Track - Ricard 75
Well, despite all of my chat in practice about how much heavier the CSL was than the Escort, I totally forgot that in the first lap of Race 2, the tight right hand hairpin that starts the approach to the back straight became a bit of a "straight-on", dropping me a few places.
Next lap (and I'll need to look at the replay to make sure if this is correct) I out braked Hans into the fast Esses, he clipped my rear quarter, and I saw a load of sand/dust being thrown up. I didn't know whether it was his fault, my fault or just one of those things, so I stopped at the chicane for him to go past putting me dead last as everyone piled through (opportunists, the lot of 'em
) Started on a very entertaining drive climbing back up the order, including some pretty punchy slipstreaming action down the back straight with Warren, Steve & Hans. I managed to claw my way back up to halfway, and was now following Luc in the 906, which was a real quickie. I saw Luc closing in on Croucher, my gap holding pretty static to Luc, so Croucher was my target - through the power of XD I could see my gap to Matt getting down from >20 sec down to about 13 sec, but I ran out of laps before I could get any higher to get into the mix with Matt, Luc & Amir - no matter really, it was good getting that far.
Really very good fun. The tracks were excellent, the cars I and most others drove were close and competitive.
One consequence of Avi's superb win in Race 2 is that the big Capri may not now make the cut for the league 2009.2, as it was waaaay out in front - only the other (banned) Corvette giving it any real competition. The CSL's, 911's, Escorts's, 906's were all pretty close - add the lesser Corvette in there and that's a nice little field IMO. Looking at the timings, with this pretty closely matched group of drivers, we have a 906, a CSL and a 911 all within 0.7 sec of each other. That's the sort of closeness I'm after.
