Season 5 - Race 4 - Suzuka - Division 1

[Reik Major]

thx Peter!

 

[Daniel Hansson]

...the track temperature was around 39c and the air temperature around 32c or so, that was really strange.

I find it strange too. The weather file has 20 degrees in air temp. Have anyone else looked at the temps?

 

[Tim McIver]

Firstly, my apologies for my lack of forum posts lately. It’s been a busy few months, but now I’m married, so that’s all sorted, back to racing, and have even managed to have a win, which I will come to shortly...

If anyone’s interested there’s a video on youtube of me and the new wife trying to get onto the Australian version of ‘The Amazing Race’. I good friend made it and it does include some fairly cringeworthy moments but also includes some good shots of my racing setup (maybe a poor idea to let the world see...) and a few of the wedding. This isn’t the sort of forum where you show pics of your wedding, but hey, I missed a race for it, so it must of been kind of important.

On to issues of more relevance. I managed to do a bit more practice for Suzuka though still nothing in comparison to the hours poured into the battle with Chris last season. I must first of all thank Mark for helping me with the setup, I don’t think I would have had much chance without that help. And of course thanks to everyone who has been posting setups in the forum, much appreciated. I of course plan to post any setups I come up with, but to be honest I am not all that good on setups. Feel free to ask me what I’m running if I happen to be quick somewhere.

I qualified reasonably close to my pb with a 1:25.4 which was enough to secure me 3rd place.

My race was amazingly smooth and uneventful. Perhaps the most uneventful race ever, and yet, it remained tense and kind of exciting in an on the edge kind of way. I was good off the line but only managed to maintain position into T1. I followed Mark and Reik around for a few laps until each had a minor incident. That left me in the lead but a nice margin. From there I drove on towards the pitstop with the gap remaining reasonably constant. It seemed that everyone at the front had a smooth stop and the gap remained. I pushed fairly had for the first half of the stint though I think Reik did have a small pace advantage. Once I knew I had more than a second a lap up my sleeve I felt a bit more comfortable, I then had a one wheel on the grass moment and considered that maybe three hours sleep had not been the wisest move. I backed off a little and decided to control the gap home. I came across Jakob with a few laps to go and decided it wasn’t worth lapping him with the gap I had. (Maybe you had more pace Jakob... but we’ll never know )

Very happy to get a win. Congrats to Reik and Anthony on the podium. Reik is looking very difficult to catch from here, but I look forward to trying!

Thanks as always to Nico, Mak Corp, Racedep, Presto, and our faithful Race Director.

Tim.

 

[Anthony Ishak]

I find it strange too. The weather file has 20 degrees in air temp. Have anyone else looked at the temps?

Thanks Daniel for checking this issue,

the problem actually started during the qualy session, the track seemed to me if it had rained and it was drying out and i could see light dash of water spraying from the cars in the front and i thought that was normal and that was part of the weather report until i saw Mark posting 124-9 and i thought something was wrong here as I was straggling with the grip , normally my tires get over 100c on the outlap but not this time during the qualy session , they stayed cold and i was losing almost a second compared to my PB, i was doing 126xx instead of 125-xx, then i had to reduce the tire pressure to get the tires working and finally i managed 126-2 ...

during the race i noticed my tires losing grip quickly and when i checked the telemetry on lap 34 it was around 39c " track temperature " then when i finished the race on lap 40 i looked at the telemetry and I saw the tires down to 35% and the track temperature was 41c and the air temp 33c,,, that was really weird...

i mentioned something about it after the race and Reik said he was straggling with grip as well but no one said anything about the temperature ..

I know these sound a bit weird but that what had happened so it would be interesting to know if anyone experienced the same..

Cheers

 

[Nicolai Nicholson]

I remember vaguely that I noticed that the temperature(s) were different than normal in the corner of my eye. However, I was so focused, and my telemetry is on my 4th screen quite far away from the focus of my eyes, so it is all quite blury. But my point is that I have a feeling there was something about the temps...

I to struggled to reach the same pace as in practice, my best lap in race was almost 1 second slower than what I did in practice (in practice I would do 10 laps in a row between 1.29.000 and 1.29.500, but my pb from the race was 1.29.8xx

 

[Valter Ostman]

DIV2 race:
I checked ambient temp in Motec for Suzuka. Started with 22,2 C and dropped to 21,9 C during first lap. Lap 3 temp has climbed to 22,4 C and is same until lap 8, here it starts to go up. I had max temp on lap 13, 23.4 C. Temp fell slowly to 22,2 C in lap 16 and stayed that way to the end.

Edit: Track temp was 27,0 C all the way if Motec isn't kaputt.

 

[Nicolai Nicholson]

DIV2 race:
I checked ambient temp in Motec for Suzuka. Started with 22,2 C and dropped to 21,9 C during first lap. Lap 3 temp has climbed to 22,4 C and is same until lap 8, here it starts to go up. I had max temp on lap 13, 23.4 C. Temp fell slowly to 22,2 C in lap 16 and stayed that way to the end.

Edit: Track temp was 27,0 C all the way if Motec isn't kaputt.

23 degrees rings a bell to me. I am used to see 20 I think, but it was 23 at one point at least. I can not say that I noticed any "wild" temperatures like 30+