Well, I hate to admit it but I think I have realised that I'm too old for these enduro events, or at least in GTP cars @ Nurburgring/Nords when the overall event lasts more than 5 hours in total. I was actually extremely glad to finally finish.
Once again, our RD Team seem to be cursed with bad luck, Michael disconnecting yet again, Rhys having huge FPS problems, Andrew's car catching fire down the straight after surviving more than half race distance, etc. Great effort again from Jari though, flying the flag for us.
Unfortunately, the dreaded lag issues surfaced with a vengeance, but the move to the ATR server made a huge improvement. There were still some cars lagging, but overall it was pretty good. Thanks to ATR for setting up the backup server.
Big thanks to Tyson and Motorheadz for organising this series, some teething problems, but the overall concept was great.
The night had it's funny moments though. The highlight was after we went to the ATR server, and had a flooded track for practice. I watched Cam leave the pitbay, immediately do a huge doughnut (or two). :laugh2: I then thought, "be careful and don't do a Cam", gently squeezed the Vipers accelerator, and immediately did a neat 180 deg spin and ploughed into the pitbay of the guy nextdoor. :rotfl: Oops!!. Thank god we didn't have to race in those conditions.
My race was going fairly well after about 1.5 hours, sitting comfortably in P7 with an increasing gap of more than 1.5 minutes to the car behind, and even having thoughts of maybe P6 who I was slowly gaining on. Then, one tiny momentary lapse of concentration saw me run off track, through the sand, and gently nudge the wall. Unbelieveably, this removed my front splitter, causing the car to massively understeer in every high speed bend. Worse still, I had the whole Nords track to go before I could pit for repairs. The understeer resulted in me hitting the walls several times causing more severe damage. I pitted for repairs, the splitter was repaired, but the car was now very slow from other damage that wasn't repaired. I lost three spots in the pits, and my lap times from then on were waaaay down due to car damage.
Limped home to finally finish P10.
Thanks to all of our team who put such a big effort into supporting this series. The series had it's frustrations and disappointments, but also there were plenty of fun times too, especially on TS (eg. listening to Olly giving graphic descriptions of his ever deteriorating Audi towards the end of the race
).
I really appreciate the effort you all put into this one. :thanks: