I came into the pits to refuel at around 42 mins into the race. I had noticed in the lap before that the notification that the pit window wasn't on. As such, I worked out that the 600 seconds pit window was likely to be around the 55 minute mark, so as I trundled down the first half of the pitlane I checked the race rules on Simracing.gp (which I had open on a screen next to me for exact situations like this) and realise that was what was happening. I quickly dropped the fuel load so this stop would only fuel me for 20 mins before stopping. Then I had to pit twice in the window on consecutive laps and had to suddenly adjust to fuel up for a full hour in the third stop, therefore losing further time with a heavy car early in the stint and worn tyres at the end. As this wasn't planned I ended up with one lap too little fuel and had to sacrifice 2 positions late in the race to get lapped again. We all got screwed in different ways.
Really, priority should be given first to those who pitted in the window. No matter how much it was misread and communicated, the 10 minute pit window was programmed and the rules saying that were visible on simracing.gp all week. We could all see what was going to happen, as shown here.
A question for this week, the original post says 2 pitstops, but it seems like SGP has only one configured:
View attachment 458241
Shouldn't it be "2", to match the original post?
Alarm bells should have rung in everyone's head when the pit window didn't open at 35 minutes. If you have chat or the HUD disabled, or weren't in the Discord, that's not really an excuse. Because there's no team radio with a dedicated engineer telling you this stuff, how are you going to know when something has gone wrong? Mistakes happen and this isn't the first time something has gone wrong, and won't be the last - we're all human. Rules are rules, and if some people stick to them and some don't, what's the point in having rules in the first place?
It's not like this was a massive rule change thrown in by accident at the last minute, the clues were all there and we all - drivers and organisers - misinterpreted it. I applaud whoever it was who first put a message in the chat at around 37 minutes saying this was going wrong to try and warn others, and Ricardo as well for noticing the error and trying to send a message out to everyone. It's not easy, and there isn't a perfect solution, but I don't have much sympathy for those who didn't pit at all in the window. There were at least 3 places where the information was available (simracing.gp, chat, the HUD), and if you had all 3 of them off in the race, that's no longer the organiser's fault that you missed the error. Chris Down is about the only person with an excuse because he was the one who asked for clarification and got Ricardo's (later to be proved inaccurate) confirmation that the windows were correct.
Obviously take my opinion with a grain of salt. I was screwed over by the pit window significantly (because of the long pitlane), sow ill fight the corner for everyone who lost out as I did, but as we saw in the Grand Prix - even poorly communicated rules are still enforced. There were enough sources of information here that could have communicated the mistake that excuses run thin for those that missed it. Just think yourselves lucky that the game didn't instantly disqualify everyone who didn't make their stops in the window, because as the window closed I was fearing a sudden exodus from half the field.
