LVT Round 1 - 1984 200 Meilen von Nürnberg [Mar 1st]

Blew the engine downshifting, really silly.

I had a bigger smile on my face these last few laps than at last week's race, amazing battle there at the end, Richard!

Love these kind of races, where you have to out-clever the opposition, rather than out-pace. I out-clevered Richard with 0.033s at the end! Despite missing a shift out of the final hairpin, haha.

And big congratulations to Pascal for this win! Winning this kind of race, where most run the same kind of car, means a whole lot! Savour this.

Qual 4th.
Ran the race to my plan of not stopping only to miss that we were on the last lap and I only had 1.8l of fuel left coming out of the final hairpin, I made a pitstop losing 2 places and finishing 6th, damn it should have been 4th.

Thanks for the broadcast, I've had a quick look at it and it looks great.  

Congrats Pascal and  Thiago, unlucky Cezariusz.

Very exciting race for me. Still felt like jet lag in the qualify trying to feel the car and adjusting braking points and throttle inputs. I was putting laps in 48s in my first shot and in the second the 46s came back to me.
Good to start on pole but at the same time I knew everybody would come flying behind be in T1. I tried to put a gap between me and the GC at the start but didn't work as I planned. At the first lap I could see excitement in the Group B so I let it be dropping from 1st to 5th or 6th. I think Alberto, Dave and Cezariusz tangled at the chicane, I had just enough space to avoid any contact with Alberto who had spun in the exit.

Things had calmed down and I started to get up to pace. I was following Dave Miller in the main straight and I saw Coxon coming very fast for a double pass, I think Dave didn't see him and I think there was some contact what made Dave spin and I ended up collecting him as well. It was very unfortunate for Dave.

Janik overtook me in the occasion and I had to overtake him again, much harder this time. Very nice battle, a lot of side by side and cutbacks. Cool!!

Got P3 and started catching Wilks. It was very hard to overtake as well. Wilks had a great race pace and I noticed we both were catching Cezariusz at that point. I forced Wilks to take a defensive line in the chicane what gave me the chance for a cut back in the exit.

Cezariusz was just 3 to 4 seconds ahead. He was having issues I believe. I kept the strong pace to push him for a mistake. He was just fine with very good exits in his M1 but it seemed like he had rubbed the walls quite a bit because his top speed wasn't great.

My braking point was good enough to outbreak him but I didn't want to risk too much. In the last lap I saw an opportunity building up, I was much closer at the chicane and my braking was much better in the last hairpin putting me side by side in the exit. I think he might had missed a gear or had too much wheel spin there. Don't know...

It was a very good race, a lot of fun negotiating with the group C cars and battling against the 930s and Cezariusz M1.

Congrats Pascal, Whited and Jaques in group C, congrats to Cezariusz for 2nd and Wilks for 3rd place in group B.

Thank you ISO for putting this together.

Thank you Jonathan for the broadcast!!! Awesome!!

See you next race!!!

Congratulations to all finishers!!

Thank you Alberto, I wasn't expecting to get that first win of the year on this race, though! 

Anyway, yes, this race was quite something. I was actually planning on pitting once for new rear tyres because all of my testing was done on soft tyres and the way my car was set up, I'd gotten a lot of oversteer and the rear tyres would've been shot after 30 laps.
But thanks to the absolute enlightenment by David Jaques with his wise words "Run hard tyres you doofus", that was the only setup change I had to do, and so I did the whole race on one set of tyres, and they weren't even worn! Come on, I'd have done 140 laps on those tyres! Bring it on! 


Anyway, I decided to not really give a damn about other drivers' paces, so I just ran my own pace, my own race. I noticed early on that David Jaques was pushing hard and most likely using much fuel, and seeing Jason Whited rush past me suggested he does the same, with my thought being "Either they're gonna pit or they're gonna crawl the last ten laps". Turns out Whited did the former while Jaques did the latter.
And THAT is where my little idea from Friday night came in.

I think everyone knows the software SimHub by now. I made a fuel dash display and had that running on my second screen, so I could monitor my fuel consumption both live and on a per-lap basis. I was quite good on fuel until about the end, when I started to push as I saw DJ going very slow.

The only issue which I still got to figure out, was my fuel delta. It was ONE WHOLE LAP off. At the end, there was one lap to go and I had 0.7 laps of fuel left, with my fuel delta constantly having been positive, as in "ya bruh, you got more fuel than you need". So I had run out of fuel on the last straight as well, and had I not turned UP the boost out of the last hairpin, I'm sure Whited's "no shits given balls to the wall full speed" approach to the race would've gotten him the win! Amazing pace Jason, I was convinced a pit stop would've been doom for anyone going for a win!

But yes, I'm really happy for the win, but I think I was a little too enthousiastic when overtaking DJ, because according to him, I "put his nose in the wall", which I don't agree with, but we both finished, so no harm done?

On to the next one!