Optus can go and take a flying ....... I was always going to run the hard first, and quallied second of the hard runners i think....pitted end of lap 18 and was hoping to fight for a top 5, 2 corners into my soft stint got DSC ...... *sigh*....Was going to run a few laps for the enduro but my connection is really unstable tonight for some reason so gave up.....
Difficult race. Had some reasonable pace and got P2 with ok lap of 35.4xx. Had a bad start, and went a little too deep into T1 trying to make it back up (silly silly boy!). So ended up losing even more positions lol. I just couldnt get away from CAGM/Cob while saving tyres in the opening laps. Was being very defensive with them both having turns at attacking lol They couldn't see each other, so I'd stop one, to have the other attack and vice versa lol Got unlucky with Cob tagging me in the last corner, where I guess he thought I had gone wide, but I was trying to break the slip stream by taking a later apex. In hindsight Im partly to blame, I thought I had a little more of a gap than I actually did! So we both dropped 10secs through that incident. After that I was able to pull away, but my wheel cut out a few times, which often resulted in going way wide, or even running off track, each time letting Cob catch back up.. Went into the pits on lap 16 for some hards. After a few laps on hards I had a few little mistakes, and another couple of oh crap moments with my wheel cutting out. Was doing quite a few low 38s when the wheel wasn't playing up. Sir Poop came up fast and I was able to hold off for a little, as he kept trying to attack in the wrong places, but we both lost some time, only managing 39s. Once he got past he pulled a gap easily. With 3 to go I was closing fast on Aussie, but got too excited and threw it away being a little too aggressive with the throttle, hampering my exits and resulting in very slow lap times.. Had a mad drag down the final straight where I really was hoping to get a whift of poopingtons slip stream to steal 3rd, but alas ended up 3x thousands of a second down There were quite a few fast guys at Fuji, but a few incidents too. My strat was all about trying to do consistently decent times for as long as possible. I should have probably gone a little harder to pull a gap, before tyre saving, so good lesson there for me I did really enjoy the battles even if we were going really slow
Final results: 1 - Sir poop 2 - Aussie 3 - S54ved 4 - Seth (received 10 second penalty for contact and didnt redress) 5 - slambo 6 - Giant 7 - CAGM 8 - Cob 9 - Blind 10 - Groover 11 - BMW 12 - Stu 13 - Hezza
Grand valley is the final round. Its a long race and there should be some interesting battles with a range of strats available. There are quite a few overtaking opportunities here, so lets keep it clean and have a cracking final battle to wrap up the season.
@ Luke, are the gaps her from car to car OR to the leader ? If it's car to car then Seth should be third, if it's from the leader then Seth should be 4th ????
