Well I can only thank the gods for smiling on me. What a day. After finding my PC dead this morning, I spent most of the day installing GTL to my laptop, then setting up the G25 to it, and trying to get the whole mess working. All looked ok until I tried a test run on the server, and my connection dropped every few minutes. More discussions with my ISP but no help. So I reduced all of my game settings to absolute minimum and hoped for the best. It dropped two more times during early practice, so I wasn't hopeful.
Then things improved. The connection held up all race and my rough G25 settings weren't too bad.
So to the race.
Qualified P4 with a PB of 1.28.7 ish.
Fingers crossed and praying for the race. Lap 1 turn 1 everything started stuttering, so I expected to drop. It didn't but I lost about 4 places. At the end of the lap it stuttered very badly, resulting in some more lost places. I stayed about P8 ish behind two cars battling furiously (one was David, not sure of the other) and it was slowing me quite a bit. So I abandoned my pit strategy, went in early on lap 7 and hoped for some clean space. It worked, I came out in the clear, my stuttering was gone, and I could settle into a rhythm. I was consistently doing 1.29.2's nearly every lap, and slowly picked up spots. When I noticed I was P2, I started praying like hell that my connection would hold. Andraes started slowly catching me and with about 5 laps to go it looked like a very close finish was in store for us. Then Andraes pulled into the pits (more fuel I guess) leaving me to finish 2nd.
All in all, a miracle finish, considering the day I had endured.
Congrats to Jerome, the Falcon reigned supreme.
Big congratulations to Peter for winning the overall championship (I assume he won).
Thanks to all who ran in this League, it was very clean and raced in very good spirit. I really enjoyed this one.