wow... when I took my feet off the pedals at the end of the race, and found I could hardly move my legs, I realised what a monster of a race it was.
Being the longest race I've been in it's hard to remember everything that happened. Back when I was a lad in qualifying I made it around 19th. Was such a small spread of times that it was quite promising for the race.
Start of the race went okay, unfortunately Grant had a bit of a wibble on lap 1 which ended up in the side of me, didn't affect my race but looks like it took quite a bit from him. Ended up racing with Evanses and Kieran and a couple of others for the first 15 laps. Then I arfed off the side of the last corner, having forgot to slow down for it (oops). Ended up with suspension damage but it didn't seem to be noticeable so I never got it repaired. Put me back just behind grant and it continued that way for quite a while.
Pitted at the end of lap 30. Never used manual pit before but I figured I should play it on the safe side. Came out of the pits just behind a big group of us backmarkers queued up behind the front runners
. I was quite enjoying hanging at the back of the group waiting for the front runners to pit (no idea how far away that was though)....
....Unfortunately at T1 of lap 37, having looked at the replay, we had a chain reaction... Steven (I think) and Andrew, unbeknownst to me, had a small bump, leading to Kieran having a small bump behind them, and having missed the first bump I ended up in Kieran's rear end when he lost speed in front of me. Sorry for that, just reacted too slowly to what had happened.
. Got back on track after stalling the car and continued on not far behind Kieran.
Some time around here I was running down the pit straight and my back was starting to ache, so I leant back to stretch, but I had made the stupid mistake of leaving my mouse directly behind me. Clicked off onto the second monitor and minimized the game :shock: luckily whoever was behind me was quite a way off. So I just slowed down hoping I hadn't reached the end of the straight yet until I could click back on. Lost about 5 seconds in total - pretty lucky not to lose a lot more.
Caught back up to Kieran and I could see he was taking T1 sideways pretty much every lap, and after a few laps I had a good exit to the final turn, leaving us level on the straight, so I took the opportunity to get past.
Pitted again lap 59-ish. Ended up in 10th behind just behind Gary (two laps down of course, since he was in first place) for most of the rest of the race. Stuart who was a position up in 9th was coming up a lap ahead of me and I let him past, then was surprised to see Gary pit on one of the last laps :shock:
on the penultimate lap I decided to do a repeat of my lap 15 incident after forgetting to slow for the final corner again, but no effect on the outcome
Last person to cross the line (always seem to be for some reason), finished in 10th. Although it was quite hard to concentrate with everyone talking over my lap. I nearly crashed into the pit wall on the final straight as someone had typed "congrats to all who finished" and I was going to reply "I might not finish if you keep talking
"
Thankyou to whoever said shh
Had some good races going on for quite a few laps. Very good track and event. Very happy to have made it to the finish line. Congrats to everyone who finished, and everyone who didn't I guess
Thanks for the race,
Happy day after herrmannator day
