Some thoughts on last nights race...
Qualifying in 5th wasn't so great, joining late meant I was doing qualifying on my starting setup of mediums on the front and softs on the rear - I was trying to burn off the fuel but left it too late to go onto all softs. Still at least I was clear of the first lap carnage :-)
Despite seeing how the short pitlane / pitstop affected our trial run race on wednesday I still underestimated just how effective it was until I saw
CLR_CMOS pull off a 2nd stop and come out ahead of me when I'd only done 1 stop.
On wednesday I'd gone for a 1 stop race and
Sejanoz and I were very close all race and I was 4 seconds behind when he pitted around lap 24, but he came out again only 7 seconds behind on a new set of soft tyres and went on to beat me by 5 seconds.
Last night I'd decided to go for the same strategy that
Sejanoz had used so effectively in the previous race (1st stop around lap 6 then a long run until lap 24 then back onto softs for a sprint to the line) but seeing
CLR_CMOS exit the pit I decided to change - I was on hard tyres that were about 7 laps old at this point and was lapping around 1:41, CLR would be at least 2 seconds a lap quicker and my tyres were only going to get worse. I knew I could manage 6 laps on soft tyres before burning our the fronts so stayed on my hards until lap 18 then changed to do 2 x 6 lap soft tyre runs to the end - I'd been holding up Sejanoz for the entire middle stint but switching strategy made a huge difference and I finished 12 seconds ahead of him.
I watched the replay whilst waiting for the F1 to turn up on All4 -
BradleyLove made his long runs work on hard tyres which was like the opposite of what he talked about in the chat :-) 5th to 9th place was so close and it was really hard to tell who was going to prevail,
GHG after his nightmare start had to pass everyone then pit and do it all over again!
moley moley moley was quick and consistent in his BMW, I thought he was going to catch Bradley at one point but the strategy / pitstop let him down.
Not a great turnout, Jambo and Gvon we knew about but no cooldawn, RounD, guiameijide or Metalmurphy was disappointing.