The tyres were fine...if you worked out where to push and where not to.
In practice I found I could only do 10 laps on the Softs, losing a lot of time as the FR was torn apart and I pitted with 3% left on it after three laps of no pace.
For the race, I decided to lift and not push at all through T3 and T8. These were the fastest left-handers, and were pretty soon followed by more high-load lefts. By keeping the temps down in the first part, they didn't heat up again in the next corners and take more heat out of the tyres. I was surprised to be the last to put of us top 3, especially as Jan was on the Mediums. Having got my Softs to Lap 11 with 40% left on the FR, I was tempted to try a one-stop onto Mediums, but I just mirrored the other two when they stopped to make it more of a race.
Took mediums for the last stint and managed to do 7 laps with only about 30% of the tyre gone, so I pitted for SuperSofts at the end when David Pitted too anyway.
@Jan Larsen did you use my setup? The Softs and Mediums still felt good on it, just were a bit slower.
These tyres fell apart if you overheated them, hence why a few spins would destroy the rear tyres. If you managed to keep them good, you were fine. There was one lap in the middle stint where David was first on Softs, Jan second on Mediums and me third on Softs. We got to turn 8 and Jan went from being half a second in front of me to half a second behind David, while the gap between David and Me stayed at 2s. I could see just from that one corner why you were having bad tyre wear Jan, for the reasons of overdoing it through 8.
These cars were tricky, I won't deny that, and the tyre strategy needed a lot of thought - much more than the "jump in and drive" method most of these rF2 races usually employ. However, I really enjoyed that aspect, plus it gave us some great battles. We went 3-wide for the lead down the back straight at one point.
To everyone who stuck around to the end of the race, thank you. It was a fun night and I hope you enjoyed it.
