Bad luck about that line of dead pixels @t_b_williams
Well despite the result, my night was not quite straight forward after changing out of the test car. After my first practice lap in the race car, I'd already felt a noticeable drop in rear stability which hampered my braking confidence and acceleration. This was showing up as a consistent 3-4 tenths time loss in sector 1 alone but we were about to start qualifying and I wasn't absolutely certain enough to give up my good pit-box location for a precautionary visit to the workshop.
Not long after starting my first flying lap, I lost electronic steering for a few seconds and headed straight on into a wall which allowed @incey past. The rear end did not hesitate to misbehave with the additional loss of downforce so it took two attempts to drag back past on the straight before I could throw together a decent lap for provisional pole. Unfortunately a few spectators found their way into the paddock and had to be escorted from the premises, followed by @Adronaught forgetting to disengage his invisibility testing cloak and smoke machine so I did not get around to improving my pole time.
Had a good start and found myself with a small gap after some guys got tangled up in T1, but as I tried to rediscover some lost time through T1, @Hatfield kept pace behind and started closing in. At this point I decided to employ some of that fancy "chimp management", told it to bugger off and was soon back into a groove with some ok lap times. I'd increased the gap to about 8s and was relatively comfortable with my decision to pit once the tyres had worn down to 4. This happened to be the end of lap 18 and I came back out with a similar gap as before but with tyres that were at least 1 lap fresher.
I decided to push for 2 laps to regain the fastest lap but fell short of breaking into the 1:19s with two almost identical times in the 1:20.1s (separated by 1 thousandth of a second) so gambled on a third lap and went all in. Although the first and third sectors were slightly slower than the previous attempts, a hooked up middle sector was just enough to squeeze me into the sub 80s lap. From then on I settled into a reasonable rhythm so as to not fall off the track and brought it home for a satisfying win.
Last edited: Mar 14, 2016
