Bit of an interesting one for Rd 7. The entire field were set to race in the 2018 Porsche GT3 car, so to say a spanner was thrown in the works was an understatement.
Qualifying
It’s been a tough week with work commitments which has resulted in the practice sessions being few and far between. not to mention I am now practicing in a different car for a separate league. My practice for this Round consisted of 30 minutes the night before, poor I know and certainly deserves a poor result. One plus for the race though were the conditions, relatively warm with a sunset race time.
So cutting to the chase, qualifying started out hectic as usual with everyone trying to get on track all at once. The usual queue at the end of the lap formed before everyone rolled round the final corner for a flying lap. Qualifying was tight and non of us really put in a flyer. Dan Wood was noticeably quick and was one of the better qualifiers out of PSR.
Race
It was quite atmospheric having 30 odd Porsches rumbling down the start finish straight. But T1 soon shook you back to reality and made you realise how much we were going to need to concentrate if we wanted to finish without any incidents.
The racing was close for the most part with signs of who had done their homework and got the set up right, which in this car was certainly make or break. It appeared our setup took its toll on the front tyres and began to chew them up. So the pace was their at the start of each stint but before long the car became a handful. I battled with Dean early on and we were quickly gaining on the small train Infront before we tangled, exchanged paint and finished up sideways on the racing line. Short time after we were in the pits with only tyres being collected, fuel had to make it the whole race for this one. Sunset passed and the lights came on along with quickly falling temps this quickly highlighted the flaw in my setup and I began struggling to steady the car through Barcelona’s tricky series of bends. The gap I’d put on the cars behind quickly shortened and before long i had two cars hot on my tail which I failed to keep behind. Just down the road John Clements was struggling with the poorly set up car also and unfortunately picked up a DT which saw him lose valuable positions. Dean Allen on the other hand made the most of the second half of his race and drove his damaged car home into 13th position which also got him 2nd in silver, a great result for him. I managed to pick up a couple of positions right at the end due to a couple of drive throughs and came home in 16th. Fortunately the race only carried half points so shouldn’t hurt the standings too much.
Next week’s race is at Silverstone and back in the cars we signed up to race in.
Results
Average Sim Racer 