It was a real blast Eric, thanks for setting this up!
João, I too was in a C6R, but had the car setup to hit about 291 km/h at the end of the straight before the final downhill part after the bridge. I wanted to keep it fairly conservative in case it rained (and as you know, it did!). Would you mind sending me the setup you used so I can see how you got over 300 km/h out of the car, and so I can try driving with that setup? I would appreciate it.
By the way, congratulations on the win!
Congrats to Peter Bartfai as well for your GT Sport win, great job. By the way, thanks for letting me pass on the outside - unfortunately, I drove way to high and fast into that turn and hit the outside wall. It's amazing what can happen when you get out of your rhythm.
Also thanks to all the GT Sport guys who really did a stellar job of making it easy for the GT Pros to slip by. It was obvious when you guys took a wide line letting the Pro cars pass underneath with no contact, and practically no time lost for either driver.
Qualifying (7th)
I did not qualify as well as I had hoped, but at least I got a hot lap in which meant I was not at the back of the field trying to weave through the GT Sports (I felt awful for Mark Birney who had to do that). I finished my hot lap with only about 10 seconds to spare I think, so I was happy. It wasn't really that important anyway.
Race (3rd)
I didn't have a great start because I had some late wheel spin after the start, so I lost one position in turn 1. I figured a 1 position loss was not too bad, especially at this track, and I was very glad to see that everyone in front of me and around me made it through the first part of the track intact. We formed a single file pretty quickly which was a-ok with me! :smile:
After a few laps in the first stint I started picking up spots because of others have issues. I saw a couple of cars go off, which let me get by relatively easily, and I saw Bram in the wall near the last turn at the end of the long straight. I actually never really raced hard with anyone the entire time. It was a true endurance race - I simply put in fairly consitent laps, stuck with my pit strategy and it worked out pretty well in the end.
When the rain started near the end of my first stint, I thought, uh oh, is it going to get worse? I wasn't sure but had to pit, so decided to put new slicks on instead of wets and fortunately, it paid off because the skies cleared up later. That was a lucky break.
I have not reviewed the replay yet, but I can only remember two times when I had serious offs causing me to lose valuable time. Overall, it wasn't bad. One was in the rain after my first pit stop, and the other was when I was passing Peter - both all my fault. Luckily, I was able to gather myself up quickly and get back into the groove, forgetting it ever happened. I did find my mind drifting off a few times during the race, especially near the end, but was able to re-focus and stay on track for the most part. The body did have some minor damage, but nothing major thank goodness.
In the end, all I wanted to do was finish - I knew if I could just finish, I'd probably have a good result due to attrition. I am very pleased with the result and could not ask for more than a podium 3rd place finish. Both João and James were faster than I was, so they deserved to be ahead of me. I am happy to finish 3rd among all these great drivers and feel badly for the drivers who had computer or glitch problems - that is disappointing whenever it happens.
Eric, and the admins at RaceDepartment, what else can I say, but thank you. I understand that it takes a lot of time and work to organize an event like this and that you rarely get the recognition you deserve for doing it.
I hope at some point, there is a GT race series here in the RD Club with "normal" length races and maybe an enduro at the start and finish of the series. Personally, I would love to see an 8 race series with the first and last events to be enduros (2hrs or more). All the races in between should be somewhere between 75 minutes and 90 minutes. But, this is a topic for another thread.
Thanks again to everyone who participated and especially to those weary souls that actually finished this grueling race!
:victory:
(I look forward to downloading the replay so I can watch the race in all it's graphical glory when I get my dead video card replaced with a new one). I turned off my local replays because I thought I read somewhere that it may have an affect on performance during the race) :-(
