A mixed bag of racing for me. I copped some hits, gave some hits, still learning how these cars behave in a pack, I suppose. The highlight was some racing with Mael where we changed positions a few times. After I turned Brad around in race 3 and ended up half off the track, I wasn't really bogged, but it took an age to get the car restarted for some reason.
These are totally different beasts to those finely tuned go-karts we raced last season. Looking at how these handle and move, I think I got a lot of my ideas from watching the Sydney to Hobart yacht race on Boxing Day! Last night was as about as close to a ‘perfect’ night I think I’ve every had since racing some mates at a Hyperstimulator centre back when they were a ‘thing’ early last decade. The fact that these cars feel so slow and you are needing to commit very early makes them extremely tricky to drive quickly and I’m finding that there is a very fine line between hitting the apex and understeering off the track. What the results don’t show, is how hard it was to hit the apex’s and walk that type rope between speed and crashing.
Race 3 was extremely frustrating. Ultimately I ran out of laps to run down Mael, so credit to him for keeping it on the black stuff and not faulting. Apart from the 10+ seconds I lost at turn 1 it was also the two or three (I can’t remember) laps it took me to get past Joe which interrupted my charge to chase down Mael. Despite the difference in lap times, these cars were very close in speed and we all know Joe rarely make mistakes. Eventually I was able to do some side by side driving with him from the hairpin at the end of the back straight to the second to last corner and snuck past when he ran slightly every so slightly wide.
As more people get a handle on these cars the racing will be far less lopsided, plus with the variety of tracks on the calendar we are going to see different car’s strengths come to the fore as the season progresses. That’s said, after last weeks testing, I can’t wait to get to Lakeside because that is one hell of an epic roller coaster!
