Birthday bash @ Nordschleife

I come to this race report with two things on mind:
1. A DNF is dissapointing, however,
2. I had some of the MOST FUN i've EVER had here at race2play.

I practiced with Kevin and Tristan a night or two and helped lower my times.
Did a pretty good qualifying lap, even with a little bit of traffic.
Was happy with a 9:55 - put me into 9th spot

Went into the race with the mindset that I would finish no matter what.

Started the formation lap feeling very strong.
Drove up behind Heinz and started the race.
1 or 2 cars spun in front of me on the first quarter of the lap and I got around safetly.
Heinz happened to be one of those cars who just had a slight error.
He caught me back up and we battled... for almost a whole solid lap.
It was constantly give and take and I couldn't be happier. What a fantastic way to drive a race.
I would pass him, he would pass me back, It felt so great.
I felt like we were evenly matched: he would be quicker in some parts of the circuit and I would be quicker in others. It was just brilliant.

With 39 minutes to go I was back behind Heinz again, determined to keep at it.
Came through the chicane but something went wrong and I was thrown full speed into the gravel.
I knew that Nord has very deep gravel, and when you lose momentum your practically stuck.
I tried to keep the momentum up, but the car came to a halt.
I was then determined to get out of that gravel and continue on to finish; after all, that was my goal.
Trying different throttle techniques, using clutch, doing everything I can to slowly get out.
I could get around 1 or 2 kph everytime I applied throttle.
Engine started to overheat.... Not good.
After over 3 minutes of trying to get out of the gravel, I was almost there.... but it wasn't my day.
Engine went.

Either way, I really enjoyed the first half of this race.
I got to drive with the normally extremely quick guys (such as heinz) and It felt great.

Happy birthday Justin.

Hope to do another here someday.

Andrew

Grats to GTNDC, Tristan and Sam .. Tristan is EVIL around this track... well done!!!

Thanks for the kind words about our battle Andrew, I guess we havent raced around each other alot, so I suppose you using your lights was a good communication tool, Though i felt like you were giving the place back too easy when i got back behind you, but it did lead to a good tug of war for a while, I saw you go off on that part of the track and was pretty sorry for you. Nice racing with you anyway.

I managed to give myself pretty hard damage on the pit in lap very early on in the lap and had to nurse the car all the way around with broken rear left suspension, but otherwise i had an ok time out there, and well done to Dennis coming back from his off early on to take 5th..

Was sorry to see the birthday boy make a mistake so early in the race..

I'm haping with the lap i put down in quali, and my fastest race lap, but kiss the floor infront of tristan.. unbelievable...

Well done all

Yeah I did give up a little bit when we got too close Heinz, but it was all for the good of me finishing the race. I didn't want to screw up both of our races by trying to pass/get passed in a ridiculous way.

These are very kind things for you two to say... Thank you. Makes me feel like a million bucks :-)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JUSTIN!!! And thanks Darren for the fun-run idea!!

My race was fantastic. I love this track. Just love it. I feel like my heart belongs to the Nuerburgring. Every race lap was faster than the lap before it. I just kept getting more and more comfortable. I never quite got Hohe Acht, Metzgesfeld or Bergwerk right, but all in all I had an absolute BLAST throwing the E21 around virtually every corner here. Just can't get off the thought of how much fun this was.... "dorifto... works 60% of the time, every time."

"...that doesn't make any sense..."

It's beer thirty. Goodnight gents :-)

1st time on this track today and my 1st completed lap was my Q lap.

I just wanted to finish this race and had one bad off wherei almost got stuck in gravel but fortunatly made it out after a about a minute. I drove fairly cautiously as I'm not entirely familair with this track.

It's an excellent track and I had a blast. I managed to come home in 12th on the lead lap after starting 17th.

thanks

Lots of fun, this. Thanks to everyone for showing up. I am surprised at how few DNFs we had.

I had a really good pace going a couple weeks ago when I first signed up for the event. My personal best is like a 9:40, but in the day before the race, I was only able to find 9:45 and wasn't consistent, at that. Raceday and I qualified with 9:48 and was pretty happy to just be near the front. The race started clean and safe. I had made a point to race really easily because I did NOT want to end up with damage or screwing my whole race by pushing too hard. Unfortunately, I took it too relaxed and was driving lazy and caught myself touch a smidgen of grass and that was all she wrote. I slammed both ends of my car into the walls in a narrow downhill section and lost both wings and took damage all over. I came to a stop in front of traffic and had contact with at least one or two cars. I am really sorry to whomever was caught up in that.

From there, I had a REALLY long and painful lap back to the pits in last place. After that, my whole race was quite clean. Because I had to pit so early, I still had to make a second fuel pit later in the race ,so any chances of finding serious positions was pretty much shot unless someone ahead of me had a serious incident. I ended up crawling up to 9th by the end of it and was happy to finish in the top 10 after that mistake. I would like to do more running of this track. I like doing it casually as an exhibition because it's too stressful a circuit for really serious racing.

Thanks again to everyone for coming out. It was good.

Glad you were able to drive to the finish on your b'day run Justin, no such luck for me.

Just to let those behind me at the start of the formation lap why it took me a bit to get going only to slowly drive into the armco...

Evidently, I must have hit the "U" key putting me in mouse freelook mode. So when I hit "race", all I saw was the floor of my car and didn't have a clue what had happened or how to get out of it!
I moved the mouse to get my view more or less in the proper orientation and proceeded to drive like this. While driving at speed after the start, my shaking race frame caused the mouse to move and there went my view - big crash just before Aremberg! Hope I didn't cause anyone any grief.

Not a good day for Team Snail Trail, looks like Andrew had his share of troubles too.

Congrats Tristan on your great win! : )

Dan

I will fire up PS today and tomorrow to get some screenies up!

Good fun , although a bit lonely race when Tristan was about 5 to 7 secs faster per lap and i pulled away from the 3rd place driver at the same time.

Happy to get through it without offs , but i was VERY lucky once in 5th lap when a driver reversed back into the track on a 90 decrees angle after an off and i clipped his rear end while doing prolly 150 kph. Amazingly the car felt fine after that , but the left side of the car was all 'yellow' :o.

Anyways , not a big deal because it didn't end my race and it was all for the fun :) ... but in the future i would recommend to turn the car around in the grass and then carefully merge back parallel to the track, AFTER checking that there aren't any cars closing in behind ;).

Tristan was flying out there and was totally untouchable , i had a pretty good race too ,but maybe a bit too conservative setup for the new version of the track which had a much better grip than before. Anyways i couldn't have gained 7 seconds a lap no matter what so can't complain too much :D.

Tried to get ahead of Tristan on pitstops by not taking tires ,but he had quite a big lead already and my pitcrew did a lousy job this time. It took 13.5 seconds to fuel the car , instead of the average 9 seconds that it usually does and that meant that i was about 1.5 second behind when we came back to track.
Didn't have any illusions about actually held Tristan behind me for long :D, but it could have been a bit more interesting if i could have get ahead of him after the stops :).

Tires held up nicely and didn't loose much time with them , i was about 2 secs a lap slower but the fact that i went to fill up the tank, prolly did the most of it. That was a bit stupid but when we were getting close to pitstops i felt that Tristan can maybe get the 7th lap going before the time run out , so i played safe and took a full tank of fuel :P.

Happy to get a 2nd place anyway , the new version of the track felt great and like Tristan said the combination of this track and car felt perfect 8).

Congratulations to Tristan for the dominating win and grats to Dan M for the 3rd place too , nice runs gents :). Of course a happy birthday to Justin too , very nice event :).

Thx all for the fun and cya in green hell on some other event hopefully ;).

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Samuel