Well, this one went much better than I expected. Last time I had a race at Brands Hatch was more than three years ago and it was in a different car (488), so I didn't have a setup and had to spend quite a bit of time working on it. I expected softs to be a no-go as there's a lot of fast corners and not enough straights to cool the tires down, but my major issue was figuring out the gearing due to somewhat limited powerband of the Audi. I could not come up with the ideal set, so I went ahead with the least bad one, where I would hit the limiter in 4th just before Druids, but at least all other corners were fine (setup attached to this post).
Running the quali on mediums, I could not hope for the pole, but I thought setting a lap half a second behind
@pattikins would give me P2 on the start. Then
@hape somehow managed to post a lap a tenth faster in the last minutes of the session, so I ended up in P3 on the start grid which was probably for the better as I never liked left-side starts here given that the track begins with a 90-degree turn followed by a hairpin all being right-handers.
I managed to sneak into P2 during the run to Druids, but had no chance to threaten Patrick's lead, especially since I started with 60L of gas for 2/3 of the race (decided to change to my strategy at the last moment). He started to grow the gap lap after lap which I expected, but surprisingly Hans-Peter in P3 was not getting any closer and was even falling behind a little. Not sure what could've caused that, maybe he had a safer (and slower) setup for the race.
Patrick pitted mid-race being about 8 seconds ahead of me, so given that my stop was gonna be about 14 seconds quicker I still had some spare time left and kept going for a few more laps, knowing that I should be at least 25 seconds ahead of him to come out of pits still in front. I had
@random2k4 running at about the same pace slightly ahead of me (but nearly a lap down) , so the traffic wasn't slowing me and I could run decent laptimes on low fuel load. I pitted on lap 29 and after my slow outlap (front tires cooled down too much during the stop) Patrick shrinked the gap to less than 5 seconds. Moreover, there was
@640er on new set of softs right behind me one lap down, but clearly going much faster at the moment. I decided to let him go at the first sutable moment as I didn't want him to get stuck behind a slower car (mine) and affect his pursuit of whoever he was chasing. Patrick was still a few seconds behind, so I wasn't in any kind of immediate danger after losing a second or so on that lap. After my small mistake in Surtees where I had a bad exit, I lifted off to allow Andreas to unlap himself and pull away.
Patrick caught up with me a few laps after that with about 15 minutes left in the race, but this time our battle lasted less than two laps. He had a couple of good runs on me coming out of T1, but I learned my lesson at Donington, so I covered the inside into Druids and was able to hold him off. I'm not sure if I would've been able to do that consistently for the rest of the race, but he got himself McLarened at Surtess, spun and fell more than 10 seconds behind which meant he was unlikely to catch up again barring any major mistakes on my part.
There was a strange moment with two and a half laps left to go when all the cars around and on the map suddenly disappeared and I thought that my connection crapped out or the server went down like a week before, but I kept driving and in about 10-15 seconds everyone got back on the track and fortunately nobody got teleported into me when connection restored. Hope that everybody else was intact too. That was weird, never seen anything like that before, usually if something like this happens it's game over.
This track is unique as you barely have any time to relax during a lap and most of the corners are high-speed ones with a single racing line through them, and there's grass everywhere, so mistakes on entry are very costly and you have to maintain full concentation for the entire race. Someone running consistent laps at a decent pace has very good chances to end up on the podium after capitalizing on others' mistakes, which was beautifully demonstrated by
@Kek700. Kudos to you for the solid performance, driving your school bus on this narrow and twisty track!
Big thanks to
@Chris Down for organizing this race and all the others before. I'm saddened that you won't be doing this anymore and that you couldn't race in this one (though that likely would've meant no win for me
). But if someone picks this job you left I hope you will still be joining us from time to time
