Round 1 | Spa Francorchamps

livestream video is up, everyone!

 

No problem, we were lucky in this case because I was still cautions with the P2s. When I saw you in my mirror I decided not to take my usual line through the corners, in case there was a dive bomb attempt...
So nothing happened, sorry for flashing my lights at you through the next corners, I was quite furious because that could have ended both our races so early. But thankfully nothing happened.

The qualifying went alright for me, P2. Although I think I could have taken P1, but I crashed out on my fastest attempt.
The race itself was slightly lonely, after Lance Link crashed out in Lap 2. He must have had some issue on his end, because he just went straight in T1.
After that I was managing my tyres and tried to maintain a decent distance to the guys behind. Cody Eby did close up in the end, I was fighting with tyre life and actually drove too careful, also I was held up by a GTE for half a lap as he did not move out of the way when I overlapped him.

Thanks for hosting and fair racing guys!

 

I'm not sure if I was meant to race or not the red and green things weren't there and figured that meant it wasn't to be. Some point later I was closing pages and noticed an old version of the page and saw it was green so joined quali with 5 mins to go and no practice. I used a Silverstone setup I've been working on. Didn't get to complete a quali lap anyway. On the start line I rolled forward before the green and got a stop and go so came in for my first of many drive through's. Along side at Les Combes in an ambitious but doable move when my PC froze for about 1 second which seemed like five. I opened up the wheel to avoid contact and when I was back I had 5 stop and go's. I dont know how but that killed my race and any motivation having to stop for five laps in a row. I somehow picked a few more up and put it down to very tight track limits but if its a choice between loosing it at Radion or taking a S+G - I guess I'd take the penalty.

Here's a stream of my race testing a few things out
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What an exciting 90 minutes!

A short recap from my end. Quali didn't go as well as I had liked, but I honestly wasn't expecting to be ahead of Lance or John and I can't complain about starting 3rd in my class. Lance had a very unfortunate hardware malfunction which cost him the race right at the beginning. After that John and Paul pulled away steadily for quite some time as I dropped to 4th place. Inside of half a lap 2nd and 3rd place both were involved in separate incidents which allowed me to move in to 2nd place and ultimately finish there. After my pit stop I noticed I was closing in on first at about half a second per lap, but with there being a 17 second gap and only having about 30 minutes left I knew I likely would not catch up. I did manage to take over 10 seconds off of the gap though which I was pleased about.

Somehow I manged to not be involved in any sort of collisions or incidents the entire race (despite a few close calls) which is rather unusual for me. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for everyone. There were quite a few incidents which surely effected the race results, but hopefully those will become less frequent as the series progresses.

I want to say congrats to all drivers involved in the race today, but especially to those who took home victories and podium finishes!! I'd also like to thank the entire team here at SRO for putting this series together. I'm really looking forward to the remaining race.

 

please. I hope you will learn to respect other racers and not specifically deploy them after you are overtaken

 

Thanks to all !
It was great and interesting!

 

Have no idea how I manage to race, nevermind finish...nevermind finish 2nd!
Fighting health issues for quite some time now, and looks like I will have to be very patient. I didnt even knew if I would stand the whole distance.

Im very happy with the result considering.

Managed to Qualify on the 2nd row, and just wanted to have a clean and consistent race. Almost managed that. Only down moment was when Jamed Dziuba had some very, very strong lags with his connection. I was following him, his car jumped back once....than twice....right in front of me in a very fast left hander. Nowhere to go, I touch his rear, had a spin, lost lots of time. Bit frustrating an accident because those reasons.
Car was not damaged, so I continued logging laps and doing my strategy.

A dream result and a great beggining of championship.

Congratulations to both classes winners, and thank you everybody that raced with us. I hope we all can keep coming back.

 

Good racing by all. Spent first half of the race trying to hold on to the back of Nigel/Mark/Carl/Denis while not torching my tires. Had decided right before the race to go with softs despite spending all my testing time on mediums. Figured it was worth a gamble to see how they reacted over 2 stints.

Went into pits with Nigel. Managed to overshoot my pit spot like a noob. Came out of pits with Nigel, Mark and Brian all together. Had a really fun battle with Brian. Heavy on fuel, and still trying to keep my softs from burning up, Brian eventually got me in the bus stop after several laps. Once the fuel burned off, I was able to lean on the softs again and started catching Brian in the last 10 laps, but ran out of race track.

A few LMPs need to show a little more patience and not dive bomb GTE cars into the braking zone. If you're not directly behind or beside the GTE car, you should not be dive bombing into the braking zone. Once GTE car is committed to a certain line through the apex, not a lot we can do to change our angle. When you dive bomb from 200+ feet back into the apex of the braking zone, it's asking for trouble.

Johnny G got absolutely destroyed by a LMP car dive bombing him at Blanchimont!! of all places. That's the fastest corner on the track, 5th/6th gear, at the absolute limits of a GTE car's traction circle. You have no business getting anywhere near the inside of a GTE car in that corner. That just shows a complete lack of understanding of sportscar racing. It's not a hot lap competition people. We're here to have fun, stop it with the Pastor Maldonado impersonations.

 

I like Team Cheeba Hawk's liverys ... they are "greener" than John M's BMW ...


Flying through Eau Rouge and the dust cloud kicked up by Rob


Porsche brakes always beats GM engine hah

Brian getting deep on the brakes into the bus stop to squeeze by me

 

Dammit, still gutted.
someone explain to me why people just fly past me if i go 318 km/h.
because in game it felt like im going 150 but speedometer shows normal and when did little praccy i did 2.00 - 2.01 on race trim.
This caused my accident too. I went flat out to eau rouge, no lift, no brake and still i got bombed like if i was hitting max brakes.

 

Disagree with this. P2 cars get an advantage because they queue at the end of the pit lane before the green light. All I did was the same thing. I waited until the 10 minute mark and was out on track at the right time. A long pit lane and you can loose a chunk of time to a guy whose pit box is right by the exit. Waiting at the end of the pit lane is much fairer. It's not much I know but on a long lap it can make a difference between getting another lap in. But hey you make the rules but I can disagree with them. I will wait next time

 

Qualy : Only managed to get 1 lap flying lap as I kept catching slower cars in front of me. But it was good enough for 4th and probably wouldn't have gone faster if I'd had a couple fast laps.

Race : At the start I picked up 2 places and after a couple of laps I was running 2nd. Then things began to go wrong. First problem I began to notice difficulties in changing up. My wheels flappy paddle began to get very stiff (perhaps due to over excitement ) and then it finally stopped working altogether. A mad scramble to uncover my H-Pattern shifter and I spent the next few laps fumbling most of my gear changes. It's amazing how much of a rhythm you get into. Next problem I got distracted by a P2 car going over Eau Rouge and lost the backend (bit of a brown moment ). Hit the wall and this bent the steering. Managed to get back to the pit lane and sat there for 109 seconds. I also managed to change my wheel so back to flappy paddles. Glad I had that option. My race seemed done. Came out over a minute behind the guy in front in 19th (I think). But then noticed I was taking huge chunks of time out of his lead. Put my head down and quickly reeled him in. In all managed to fight back to 15th (7th in class). Oh the last thing that went wrong was another brown moment through Eau Rouge and I cut the corner. This meant a Stop/Go penalty. Came out behind Rob. With 5 minutes to go I had little time to do anything. But the guys ahead Rob and Barrett must have been struggling with their tyres as I managed to catch and pass them. Eventful race with the speed difference between the classes you really needed to have eyes in the back of your head. But most of the P2 cars made their passes in sensible areas so no problems.

Well done to the winners and podiums
Well done to all who finished and commiserations to those that didn't

Now I need to fix my wheel.

 

Could we simple not just say we can leave the pits at anytime but can't go out on track until 10 minutes to go, as if the lights were red on pit exit?
An other thing that was not optimal was people were joining and leaving the server during qualy, this causes hickups, lags sometimes. I don't know if it can be avoided, but it be great if it did not happen.