Despite the limited practice time this week, I crammed a lot in at the last minute, and felt reasonably good from a pace perspective. Then Mark and I did a practice, and I lost count of how many incidents and penalties I had. Wasn't so enthused any more.
Qualifying
Funny story as qualifying started. I had been playing with my wheel settings last week to try and feel more from the car and tires, particularly the oversteer. I had my force feedback cranked up to the maximum, and I think all it really did was make the wheel heavy. This extra force was actually giving me blisters on my thumbs, so after the practice race with Mark, I went and grabbed some cycling gloves, which I did actually use for sim racing many years ago. Head out on the track in qualifying and realized I can't just try something new at the last minute, so half way through my outlap, I was desperately trying to take them off, but they're all velcro'd around my wrist, and it was no easy task. Almost crashed so many times on that outlap!
Well, that's a whole paragraph, and I haven't even mentioned how my qualifying went! I had only done 5 total practice laps in qualifying up to that point, and had managed a 1:39.491, but otherwise didn't have much idea of what to expect. My first hot lap was really bad. My next was an improvement of over a second for a 1:39.679. The last, well, it barely got started. As I was heading down toward turn 1, there were yellow flags, and I saw a car in the run off area, and I think I just got distracted, took the inside too tight, bounced of that wall, then hit the wall on the outside and destroyed my car.
Ultimately, I was reasonably happy with my position of 7th in qualifying. The time wasn't quite a PB, but it was higher than where I expected to start a few days ago.
Race
The plan was a 1 stop, running the Ultra's until lap 5-6, then pitting for the Soft's and running them until the end.
Good start, and briefly moved into 6th, but I'm still too cautious on the opening lap. I'm just so determined to avoid any and all incidents, but of course, it's tight around here, so opportunities are scarce anyway. Fell to 9th, then settled into 8th. Most of the first lap was good though. It was clean, and I felt faster than the cars in front of me. I say "most of the first lap", because I clipped and damaged my front wing at turn 15. Ugh, not again. At first I thought I'd keep going to see how it felt, but then I clipped the opposite side of the front wing going through turn 19, so I decided to pit. Pitting early didn't feel like a huge issue because I could easily run the Soft tire the entire race distance, and still have low wear at the end. Either my setup or my driving style gave me really low wear here compared to Mark. I was about a half second away from having Inters fitted when I pitted, but I got the menu option changed just in time!
On the very first turn after exiting the pits, I damaged my front wing yet again. You have got to be kidding me. This time, I have to keep going and hope it doesn't lose me too much time. I can't afford another pit stop. Maybe there will be a safety car I'm thinking, otherwise, I need to stay out. By this point, we were already down to 15 drivers after starting with 19, and I was in 12th. I had Falco Bronzo ahead and I start closing on him pretty quickly. It was turning into a nice little battle, but then his car jumped, ghosted, and I just drove through him.
Jonathan AI was next ahead and I started closing on him. I had an easy, albeit, slightly scary pass on him, when he had an accident going through the castle section, he stopped, and I just barely squeezed past. I was starting to feel better at this point. We had lost three more drivers from the race, and were now down to 12, so I was starting to think I'd get points if I can just survive, but I was actually back up to 7th already.
Norm was next in my sights, but I also had kub behind, and he was closing. Kub seemed to have an incident somewhere as the gap increased a lot, but then I too had an incident, and ended up facing backward next to the castle. Amazingly, no damage, but I did lose 7 seconds getting myself turned around. Norm pitted on lap 12, and I was into 6th, and when kub pitted a few laps later, I was starting to think I might manage to hold onto 6th until the end since I didn't need to pit again. I was 22 seconds ahead of the car behind when we had just 9 laps to go.
Then disaster struck. I damaged my front wing even further. At first, I did the math and thought I should still go to the end. I could lose a little over 2 seconds a lap to the car behind, and still hold onto my position, but right at that moment, the Virtual Safety Car was deployed, so I decided to pit since I'd lose less time in the pits than normal, though I did have to wait for them to repair my front wing of course. I decided to go for Ultra Soft's. 9 laps on them was a stretch, but I figured some of that time would be slow laps behind the VSC. Of course, as soon as I'm coming into the pits the VSC is over, so there ended up being no advantage to pitting then at all!! Mark had pitted right before me, and it seemed they weren't quite ready for me. I think it's usually about 9 seconds to replace a front wing, but this was a bit longer. The guys who had to replace my front wing weren't there initially, and they just came casually walking over after taking the front wing off the rack. Really weird.
After all that, I had fallen from 6th to 9th, but I knew I was on fresher tires than the 3 cars I'd just lost positions to, and I immediately got to work, pumping out 1:43's, and I caught and passed Norm before the lap was even over with a DRS boost.
Next was Bobino, and by the end of lap 21, I was ready to make the same pass on him with DRS that I made on Norm. As we were getting onto the back straight, he tried to slow before the activation zone to let me pass, so he'd get DRS, not me, and while it was a great strategy, I so very nearly hit the back of him because of how much he slowed. He did indeed get DRS to retake the position he had strategically given up, and he had the inside line for turn 1, but I had a feeling he might go to deep, and he did exactly that. I just made sure I nailed my braking point, and then cut back under him to make the pass. 7th.
kub was about 12 seconds ahead, and he seemed out of reach, so as my tires started to wear, I decided to stop pushing and instead just focus on maintaining a gap to Bobino behind me. Last lap and I'm easily holding the position, and heading down the back straight when I clip the inside of turn 19, and slam into the outside, knocking off my wheel. Race over. All I could do was hope that some of the drivers behind me were a lap down so they couldn't start their final lap, and yeah, I lost 7th, I lost 8th, but no more at least. 9th. I think I was just distracted, and already starting to sum up my thoughts on the race. I'm an idiot.
Summary
At this point, 4 races in, I can call it a trend. I have bad races. I have to cut out these mistakes. I need to take a break from these rollercoasters and just have a really boring and uneventful race. From turn 3 on lap 2 until turn 18 on the final lap, things were actually really good, even with that extra pit stop that was almost under the VSC. Just the stuff outside of that was enough to ruin my race. Still generally fun though. Some good battles, and I look forward to the race each week!
Not really ready for a break week at all, but I'll get caught up on some video edits and let my thumbs heal
Spain is next and while I had my first ever race win there, it's not really one of my favorite circuits.
