Pacific FB: Barcelona

Thank you, long first gear.

Well I woke up at 4am today to do some extreme G2 racing... whoops, I'm 24 hours early! As I'd already woken my mum and dog up I thought I might as well make something of it, and saw this race. I hate the track, but the cars are fun enough.
I was a million miles off the pace in quali and ended up 7th. Thought the race was going to be awful. I got an amazing start (making a habit of that recently!) and got to 2nd by T4, but fluffed that and went down to 3rd, had nothing for Conor and went to 4th, then made a rookie mistake locking the brakes and going straight on at T4 a few laps later and ended up 5th for the mid section. Span again later chasing Peter, went down to 7th, climbed back to 5th (I hope I didnt hit you along the way Chas, you span but I dont think I touched you), and when Justus span in the closing laps I retook 4th. If I'd run a perfect race I probably would have ended up 2nd, but I guess thats what no practice does for ya.

As always it was well worth the 4am alarm to race you Pacific guys, and I hope to do it again soon (although my mum is pretty pissed I woke her up...)

Cya!

So, this was my first race in rFactor and my first race in these cars. WOW! They're tons of fun, but they make you paranoid because they really can't take damage.

I had a horrible qualy, starting 20th, 1.7 seconds off my pace I was putting in during practice. In any case, I worked my way up the field, but sadly I managed to bump into Greg P twice in some accidents that could have been a ton worse and only ended up 15th. Fun track and amazingly fun cars.

Again, my apologies to Greg P. I'm really sorry I was too aggressive in some corners and managed to mess you up too.

Heh...I lucked into that win :P

Car felt great in practice and was able to get into the top 5 with a fairly good time. Qualed 3rd so I thought I had a decent chance for a win or at least a top 3 despite having second thoughts of running the race.

Stupid me elected to go with more engine brake mapping during warm up to help me decrease entry oversteer but forgot to add a bit more fuel because it will drink a bit more. Didn't realize that until later >:(

The start of the race was rather poor on my end. Seems like I made the same mistake as Tristian and went with a longer first gear so I didn't get off that well. We ended up going 3 wide going down the front straight and finally backed off to let them by (as well as Scott behind me). So I fell back to 4th after Tristian spun and hung out for a lap or two. Got a little run on Scott coming out of the final turn a few laps later and grabbed 3rd back.

So I found myself behind TC and Justus and was just trying to settle myself into a good rhythm that was fairly quick but nothing too extreme to wear out my stuff too quickly. I then slowed down to about 80% of my potential after finding out my car was inefficiently burning fuel :(. Luckily, that didn't drop me too far back but those two ahead pulled away a bit and continued until they hit traffic.

That slowed them down a bit and bunched us up once again. A couple laps later, Justus spun out in the chicane and collected TC in the process. I saw it coming so I easily moved out of the way and grabbed 1st. Spent the rest of the race conserving fuel and won it with just 4 liters left in the tank.

Fun race :). Wasn't expecting to win it so I am pretty happy :). Car handled great and lucked played in my favor tonight. The thought of getting another lag spike haunted me the whole race like it has for the past few rFactor races that I have participated in but nothing too bad happened. Hopefully that trend continues :)

Wow! That was one of those races that keeps you coming back for more! A little off my own pace during qualifing ended up 18th. Got a good start and jumped up to 15th. Outside of turn 3 I think a car was sideways in from of me, I took to the grass to avoid him. No major damage so I continued on. I had fallen back to 22nd. Slow and steady I tried be consistant and get to the finish. I never was able to turn lap times I had turned in practice, but continued to hit my marks. By the checked i had worked my way up to 12th with a handy bit of racecraft and a lot of luck.

Great race everyonea and congrats podium!

I was have higher than normal FPS for this race? Anyone else? I think it was my computer, but thought I would throw it out there.

That was sad...

I started off with way too much fuel, but I've had several recent dnfs because of fuel so I didn't want to risk it, and for some unknown reason didn't bother to test it during practice ever.

Qualy was ok, but Tristan showed that he had 3/10 of second just waiting for qualy so I thought it would be a battle for second. I had a great start, and it seemed that Tristan had a worse than average start so I took first. I took a couple laps to get up to pace and then about lap 5 my tires just started to die. I knew it was my setup I'd just never really put together more than 3 or 4 laps on anything like race fuel.

Anyway, I was sort of keeping it together, but Tommy and Conor were always back there looking menacing. Finally I tried something a little different over the bump around turn 3 or 4 and spun. I haven't seen the replay, but I managed to collect Tommy. I came back on in 3rd but Valkovic and I were both coming up to the high speed right and I wasn't going high speed so I didn't risk it. The tires only got worse and I had a mini spin a little later to drop down to 5th. Strangely after that I felt a lot more comfortable with the car.

So basically I need to test for something other than just my fastest lap in ideal conditions. Congrats Conor, and nice racing Tommy.

Had a good start and picked up 2 places to 7th. Had great fun battling wiht Tom M - clean, tactical racing for well over half the race. Mid race spins had me seeing 5th, but I overcooked an edge in the hairpin while defending and dropped to 9th for the last 5 laps - right where I qualified.

Fun race - thanks everyone!

Thanks for that 'leniency' after you came back on Justus!
I saw you would maybe JUST get up to speed in time as I would get there, and when you didn't I thought you either had damage or cooked tires that had spun up and lost your momentum.
Once I was past I expected you would catch, as you were faster before, but then it seemed you either had minor damage or tire problems.

I knew from practice that tire issues were a problem with these cars here (front left mainly) so cars with setups not allowing for that were going to suffer even after 8 laps or so. So all I could do was hope I could stay on track and do the consistent laps as per practice, and see who might fall back and thus donate positions to me! lol

I can get these cars going fairly fast, but well off the top lap times pace!! They are terrible to setup really well so I lose all my more common advantage I can get in setups, versus the drivers who are super sharp and more skilled!
Coming 3rd is about the best I would expect, and more commonly aiming for 5th to 7th. Except on really technical tracks where I can benefit from car setup quite a lot.

All in all it was one of the better races for me!
I actually did not go BACK to 15th first and have to spend the whole race recovering back up!

My apologies to Mulgrew and Bush.. the lap one punting was all my fault, got stuck on the inside at the end of the straight and tried to tuck in there and obviously caused trouble. To the stewards ill try better next time, and ill take my penalty as due, i didnt quite know how that was supposed to work, sort of expected to see a black flag pop up on me. Now i know. but of course that sort of punting will never happen again. of course.
Its great fun racing with all of you. Hope you'll bear with me, im new to this stuff yet. Seems to get a little better each race at least. Congrats to Conor for the win.

Great race and win Conor. Congrats to Tommy C. and Peter for a very fast podium.

I made a dumn mistake durning quali on my first timed lap which resulted in car and wing damage. I didn't try and pit for repairs because I thought it was a 5 minute quali and there just would not have been time. Somehow I missed the part that said "10 minute quali". In the end it just didn't matter because I had a great time. Starting 23rd. and finishing 8th. made it all the more so.