Dang, I missed a lot of posts because I went on track earlier and never looked back.
Thanks for all the advice gentlemen, in the end I think it worked out just fine.
With some more practice I started getting a feel for the car and was able to adjust the set up and that made a huge difference in handling. Especially the back wheel camber, somehow that had much more impact than what I was expecting.
I still had to drive with TC on as my confidence in the car is not yet that high.
I already knew the track from the Mazda rookies event from last Tuesday so it was just a matter of adjusting for the car.
The "larger MX5" analogy was good, too bad the Abarth is my main drive on Wednesdays.
In my point of view the race went quite well - no problems in T1, everyone kept it really clean.
During the middle of the race felt I could get more out of the car which is good, but decided not to push to the unknown limits and risk messing things up.
In the last 10 minutes things were quite stable and I thought "this is it!" until I lost focus and missed a brake line to end up in the barrier.
That's something I am familiar with and still need to develop: endurance. Happens quite frequently on Wednesdays as well.
That crash immediately put in range of 3 more blue flags, just to keep things interesting.
Final verdict: I was scared of jumping into GT4 due to being at the bottom of the grid in the Mazda vs Abarth series, but this is quite fun and more controllable than I thought (at least the Ginetta).
I think I will be joining the Sunday sessions when I can.
Next time with ballast and restrictor.
Congratulations to the podium (Fulvio lapped me twice! What a pace!) and thank you Brian and Robert for organizing it.
See you next time.
- Ricardo