WOW, what a race :drunk:
I absolutley love Spa as a circuit and having it a wet race was not surprising at all. I have also done Spa in another league and also it was wet the too
I came into the race with an open mind, and as this is the 1st Vertigo race (apart from Watkins Glen, which I blew my car up in
) that I was going to take part in.
Ok here goes nothing.
Practice:
I just wanted to try out this car in the wet as I did no wet practice before the night commenced. I found it was ok and with all the fuel on board I knew it was quite ok handling wise. I just did a long stint in practice to get used to the track in these cars in these conditions.
Quali:
At the beggining I had the same problem as ramon and did not realise the setups had changed to default so I could not even keep the car in a straight line on acceleration. I thought there must be something wrong here and went back to pits to find the setup was not loaded lol. I qualified OK but I had lost 4 tenths in the middle sector, but I just could not hook a complete lap up to get the most out of my speed, I was very impressed with Ramons time in quali as we were running the same setups, he must have driven a very very nice lap, well done mate.
Race:
Well where do I start
The start of the race, the 1st 2 laps or so are a bit of a blur and some of the distances, times, gaps and positions may be a little different than what happened but i will try my best to remember as accuratly as I can.
At the beginning I hounded Ramon (maybe a little too eager to get passed lol) but had an absolutly immense battle with him which lasted about 5 laps
We went side by side round that fast corner before the Bus stop, banging doors and this is when I think he thought it was best to stop this madness and just keep a steady pace.
Looking back if I was on a NO stop strategy I would have done the same but at the point I thought we were all on the same strategy, for some bizzare reason I thought we all had to pit looool :bike:
So in fact if I had not gone for the pass on Ramon and one other guy infront for 2nd place I may not have got the result that I ened up with.
Ok so I will explain my dissapointment after the pitstop. The pitstop itself went smoothly without any hick-ups and I was pleased to find my speed was back. One guy pitted 2 laps after me so I thought, "any moment now and everyone else will be pitting too..." yer right, I was just kidding myself lool
I almost just quit the race after dropping frm 1st (?? or 2nd ??) before the pitstop all the way down too 15th (?) well over a minute behind the race leader
and after getting back up to 6th (?) with 40 mins left of the race I had a gap of 50 secs (?) to the guy in 5th place (?)
this is the moment when I thought my podium finish was waaaaay out the window and all I wanted to do was press the ESC button and go to the pub and drown my sorrows with a few pints of 1664
lol
But I just kept pushing, and I could see I was 2 or 3 seconds a lap faster than the guy infront, just watching as that gap decreased rapidly, I needed to keep up the pace whilst not making any mistakes and managed to do low 2 min 30 secs lap after lap when I could see the race leader was doing 2 min 33 secs.
Finally after 30 mins (?) of pushing as hard as i could without a care in the world for the state of my tires
lol. I had got the gap down to 10 secs with 12 mins left of the race, so now I was the correct side of the time, instead of needing to catch over a secong a lap to get passed, I now needed less than a secong per lap to get passed.
One guy went off at the double left corner which gave me 4th place, then I had 5 secs (?) to get the guy in 3rd.
This is where my only complaint has to come about the back markers, and it is no biggy. I had about 2 or 3 secs to 3rd place and only 3 laps to get passed yet I found my self in a battle with 2 or 3 backmarkers who just would not let me through. I even flashed my lights vigorously to show them I was coming but still nothing
In the end the gap to 3rd incresed to over 5 secs (?) and still I was not through, and to make it worse all through this I was not sure who I was fighting for postion and who I was fighting for no apparent reason.
Eventually I got a good run out of a corner and had to late brake down the inside to gain the non position of fighting with a back marker
Anyway once all this was done I had 2 laps to catch and get passed 3rd place (Tom Ilsbroux i think it was) and I caught the gap on the 2nd to last lap and over took going into the Busstop for the penultimate time.
Then I had Toni Talvitie (?) infront of me by about 3 or 4 secs (?) and I just pushed on what was by this time a very very knackered set of wets (maybe not as knackered as the guys infront of me lol) and caught the gap by the final few turns.
So going into the BusStop for the final time I made my move to get 2nd place, Toni defended very very hard pushing right to the inside of the track (very cleanly and fairly I just want to add) I broke OOOOOOOHHH sooooo late and almost shot over the Busstop completly
But managed to just find the curbs lol.
Then it was just braking for the hairpin mand it was all over.
this has to be the best race i have ever driven in my short time driving on sim racing games, and to get back 2nd place was just fantastic.
A HUUUUUGE well done to ramon for the race win, well driven there mate, you kept it cool all race long
See you all next time,
Mark.
