Race 1 - St Jovite North
This track is one of my luckiest finds, decided to try it out for the previous Mini event after looking at the lap times on no-grip, as I needed another short track to bulk out that event. It's now a sprint classic, IMO. I had a great race with Sam, he was leading for a few laps, I managed to get past with a very tight line on that blind uphill left hander, into the lead. Unfortunately due to the vagaries of the circuits topography and the Jags interesting suspension characteristics we touched and had a bit of a moment. Sam, ever the gent :good:, waited for me to catch up, but this delay allowed Tusto through with a 5 sec lead. Me & Sam resumed our dicing for 2nd & 3rd, and even though we were fighting hard we were slowly closing on Ben by the odd 0.1 / 0.2. We were never going to catch him though- a)there were nowhere near enough laps to do anything about it, and b) I suspect if we ever got close enough to worry him, he'd be able to pick up the pace as needed. Finished P2, 4 sec behind Ben, but only about 0.5 ahead of Sam. Brilliant fun.
Unfortunately there were some strange TS antics during this race which caused a few players some distraction. My phone rang during the start of the race (it turns out the Good Lady Wife had bought a couple of new handsets and was testing them out :neutral: ) and I just clicked off my mic to stop the ringing from annoying people. It turns out that the ringing would have been preferable to what actually happened. People started complaining about hearing my car through the TS app. I honestly have no idea what went on there, but my apologies to anyone who was affected.
Anderstorp South
This was the "other end" of the GP track that we had a quick blast on last week after the Muscle Car event. I had deliberately sequenced the courses so we had "Big gradients - flat track - big gradients - flat track" so it never got too similar. Quallied about 3rd or 4th, got a great start and nipped into 2nd fairly sharply (Ben's Qualcast obsession helping a bit too), and spent the rest of the race hunting down Amir. I had had to avoid Ben and that gave Amir a 4 sec lead. again it was very close timewise, but I got it down to, at one stage, 0.3 sec. To get past, I would have had to do something reckless, so I decided to wait and hope that my prescence would force Amir into a mistake. Needless to say he didn't and so we ended up P1 & P2 with just 0.4 sec between us as we crossed the line. Again, some brilliant fun. For those of you who don't know the track, there is an almost totally unmarked right hand turn in from the fastest part of the track, with a tyre wall waiting for you if you go in too deep. The more we lapped, the more pieces of bodywork we encountered scattered around this area.
Amaroo Park
Another cracking little course, this one full of gradients and sweeps. Quallied P2 again, but got a blinding little drag start up to the first blind uphill cresting left hander, and nipped into P1 ahead of Luc. 12 laps later we were still P1 & P2, with 0.5 sec between us. My tyres were shot to pieces, I was holding on, but I tried to get the clog down a bit early and understeered 2 wheels onto the gravel, giving Luc just enough room to nip through, and we resumed P1 & P2 again with just 0.5 sec between us right to the end, Luc taking the win. Really good fun, and no real problem with me losing the race like that either.
Monza Junior
Quallied P2 behind Ben. Luc got a great start behind me and he move to the inside for the first turn. As soon as I saw him in my side window, I braked early to try and get him on the switchback. As it turned out that was just about the best thing I could have done, and Luc and Ben both braked really late, collided, and I was just about the only one in control, and off I scampered into P1. Had a nice little lead but ballsed it up in T1 on about lap 10, outbraking myself and allowing Ben to catch up. It was a fairly heavy impact and my wheel was pulling to the left under braking, this caused me to run wide in the entry to Parabolica, and let Ben nip through for the win, again less than a second between P1 & P2.
A very good evenings racing in these venerable old getaway cars, big thanks to everyone who turned out.
