Yikes, I had missed that tomorrow is the COTA race. Now it appears I won't be able to participate but anyhow, here's a somewhat late report on Hungaroring (I hope to see reports from the rest of all participants too
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Q: 2nd
Once again I didnt time my preparations and finished dinner 20 mins before Q. Not a good choice of dinner either withs lots of meat and potato so guess who became sleepy. Anyway, I guess my qualy lap practice before the race once again paid off. It looked like I had at least around twice as many practice laps as all else
I had one really good attempt for P1 but blew it in last sector. Pole is yet to be cracked another day. Stable effort as usual by Dino!
R: 3rd
In last practice start, Heiko in 3rd made an obvious jump start. "Ok, so he'll make sure to cool down for the real start" I thought, but at the real start it looked like a clear jump start (if not as big) again. In one way, this was good, since it made me quite angry and therefore made the sleepiness go away. On the other hand, we need to discuss this. Let's have that in the incident thread.
Before the race, I had done only two 30 min race fuel stints simulating a 1 stop and was pretty sure 0 stop would be too risky. I was still open to change that tho. So in 3rd I got stuck behind Dino and with a growing gap behind. I felt able to go much quicker but couldn't handle the dirty air. All I could do was to 1. wait for Dino to make a mistake (which never happens) and 2. try to figure out if Dino was planning a 0-stopper and maybe go for that 0 stop anyway. A couple of laps before mid-race, still 1-2 secs behind Dino, I over shot in last sector and thought car would be wrecked smashing the barriers. No wings fell off. I didnt lose much. Got a bit stressed tho when I tried to quickly fiddle with the pit menu and decide for request and must have missed I had got some body damage or something. I think I passed Dino who a bit surprisingly to me was it pits. I decided to go in too where the automatic repair made the pit take way longer of course. After that I was all alone and focused on safe driving without hoping for any mistakes in front to motivate me to push as I intend to do
Last minutes the gap drastically shrunk tho when Heiko missed and became P2. He took up the pace tho so it was ever going to happen.
It all paid off pretty well with 3rd, but I still haven't had that one clean race as Dino seems to have pretty much every time. Pace-wise it feels like I've developed. If it wasnt for that single clumsy mistake it could have become really intense and interesting all the way to finish!
Well deserved Dino, master of consistency indeed, congrats!
Thanks to all who showed up. I don't know the reasons why we were so few, but everyone, please feel free to ask around for more people to join us. We dont have any cap of 25 racers as maybe it has looked like on the signup list.