USA nGT: Barcelona

1 driver deducted a lap for not serving drive-thru penalty for a first lap punt. Some nice racing otherwise though

Very disappointing race for me. After blowing the motor in G2, I was determined to do well tonight. At least I finished, but I had a whole bucket of bad worms to deal with.

First I forgot to take care of the tire changeup when sessions change when i did my re install of gtr2 recently. That put me into hards for some reason at the start of the race. This put me down a full .6-.8 on my lap times, not to mention I had to pit earlier than I wanted to because I couldn't drive the damn thing with less than 5 gallons of gas.

someone got into me on lap 1, but he went off so i took the drive thru just in case - even though I don't think i should have.

Then I blew a tire later in the race after having a small incident;. Pit crew killed me after the 1/2 lap trek back to the pits. On top of that...the little stinker wouldn't slow entering the pits cause of the blown tire, so I got a stop and go for speeding in the stinkin pits. Took it next lap. Lost 10th position by then, which I worked my butt off to get after all the other problems. So I continued on with the right tires and my times weren't much better. Was only about 8 minutes left with no hope of a top 10, but I drove my heart out "JUST IN CASE" something happened in front of me during the final desparate moments of the race.

I really am getting better, a lot better, but today's repeat of yesterday's bad luck really makes it look like I still suck.

Oh well LOL...there's next time. Gonna try to maintain a top 10 mover's list status. If I didn't blow it tonight. That is a real pooper.

In hindsight.In a good position,should have pitted a lap earlier and then with 3 turns before pit in,should have let Gregg go instead of battling with him.

Great racing! Had a nice battle early on with Kent, sorry Kent, I knew I was holding you up, but I thought I would at least try and out run you. Nice pass in the end BTW.
The car felt good, and the tyre/fuel strategy worked well, really starting to get the hang of working out fuel etc now, so things are looking up.
Noticed a few incidents with backmarkers, noticeably in the last few laps when I was following Rob. My heart stopped for a second when he and Yujin came together, but it all ended well (I think).
Very pleased with my 6th, which came about from just trying to be consistent and keeping the car clean.
Lot of DNF's which is a shame, but great fun all round.

Congrats to the podium, especially fellow Team Venom driver Rob. Yet another great result for the championship.

Just as well there is a break of a week between races atm.I must be getting old,can't believe i've hit the escape twlce this weekend out of frustration,might be in the retirement village sooner than expected.

Maybe someone can put together a 'wheelchair' mod for Barry! You can have the option of a cup of tea when you pit!
Just a thought.
Unlucky Barry, must admit I havent done it yet, but I can see its potential to happen.

Lol Kris,when you have done another 200 odd events,you will get the urge.

Qualified in 8th which meant the left lane to T1. A lot better than right imho. Was in 5th after the first lap and was slowly closing the gap to Mark and Rob. Made a stop for fuel and tyres halfway and got on track again close behind both but now a lap down. I needed to get by quickly to have any chance to be in front of them after they had pitted and that worked out fine. Got several calls from the game to move over but I thought: F*ck that .... I'm trying to get to the podium here and I have better tyres. :-) Got into 2nd behind Barry with a gap of around 15 secs. Managed to close that with almost a second a lap and was preparing for a fight for the win with him when he lost his spoiler out of the chicane. From that moment on it was all about not making mistakes and planning on not having to do an extra lap. I crossed the s/f 2 secs after the clock turned to zero. A great race, grats to Mark and Rob for helping emptying the champagne and my compliments to the backmarkers for being alert and helpfull.

Interesting hour, though not exactly how I'd have scripted it! But I do love this one hour format, and it was nice to get some seat time again in a real race.

Started off my night's follies by getting a DT for steaming around overheating in Q, which caught me out. 1st time I'd seen it or had it happen to me at R2P, so I was clueless as to the protocol (yeah yeah, RTFM ;-)). I've hardly done any changeable weather events, so I guess that's one more data point in the notebook.

In any case, the penalty nullified a decent 2nd place qualifying effort - had gotten down to an 8.5 offline, but couldn't pull it off tonight. Especially as I was having to dodge Andrew, who was trying to race in Q when he wasn't busy going off. Kids... very exciteable! Tip: best to ease into Q - lay back and get some room to run; if you're rubbing fenders with someone, you're never going to have a good lap. Save the racing for the uhhh... you know. ;-)

Start went OK, but lost a spot braking into T1 to Rob, then did my DT at the end of Lap 1 from 3rd. Re-entered way back in 15th, and as the intent had been to run deep and do a late stop with no tire change, I just got back on plan and settled in.

Had made my way back up to 6th when stops started cycling me up further. 27 laps in, I was running 4th and wanted to check my XD display to see how the tires and motor were, and in the process missed my braking point and ate the tire wall in T1. DOH!

That knocked the front cap off and flatted the left front, so I had to limp nearly a full lap back to the pits. I was tricycling and scraping all the way so I was worried about causing trouble for overtaking traffic, but it went ok and I made it to my pits without further drama. Where I then sat doing nothing for 12 seconds, trying to figure out what to do with the fuel since I was off sequence. Double DOH! Finally just tossed a bunch of gas in, got my service done and rejoined in 11th.

Since I'd had to take tires due to the puncture I knew I needed to make use of the grip, so I pushed hard from there. Aside from laps with traffic, I managed to get pretty solidly into the low-mid nines, with FL as my night's only bonus. Was trying to see if I could get down into the 8's in race trim, but didn't quite make it. Did manage to move up though, and ended up catching Garret who was 7th with two to go. He was getting a fight from Justus (who was a lap down then) for some reason and got held up, so I backed off and waited to see what would come of that. They finally got it sorted and we resumed, with me getting by for 7th on the last lap. Probably would happened anyway without the traffic, since I had much more tire left at the end and had been closing at 3+ sec/lap.

The DT cost me about 27 seconds, then the off was about 30 more vs a normal in-lap. Throw in another 30-40 for the slow fuel call, unplanned tire change and repairs in the pits and that's a bunch of time parked. Hard to get results that way.

Still fun trying, though - WD to George, Mark & Rob!

What an interesting race!

My qual was not so good, ran 1.08.5 in practice and had more to spare, but during qual I made some mistakes and had a hard time finding a good clean lap.

Race start: Got a pretty good launch - since Steve got a drive thru before the race even started, I figured I'd fight for T1 into 2nd spot behind Barry. Steve was very gracious about it (he could have made it much more difficult), much appreciated, I did keep it tight as I didn't want to push Steve off the track.

So Barry and I set off, had a couple of opportunities, but it would have been risky. However, this gave Mark the opportunity to catch up so we had a pretty good 3 way going.

I figured Barry was on full tanks as was I -- but Barry went in early which left me in the lead with Mark on my tail. It was a good fight, but then Mark went into the pits and I was alone in 1st.

I drove my race but got really bogged down by folks that were 1-2 laps down, not sure what the deal was there but it sure didn't help my race.

I had 100 litres and took the fuel down to nothing and pitted. Didn't take any tires and came out 8 seconds behind Barry. Then my DX did weird stuff so I wasn't sure where I was. George and Mark caught up on fresh rubber and I really didn't have anything for them.

I gotta find out how George managed an earlier pit stop with more fuel and tire change that only took 5 seconds longer than my less fuel no tire change stop -- dang George, how did you do that??

Congrats to George and Mark and my teammate Kris for a great performance!!

Great fun!