Well, that was a great race. My mind and body are absolutely worn out from so much practice this weekend. I put a great deal into preparing for this race because my girlfriend was out of town camping and without her to supervise me, my sim racing intake can reach dangerous levels.
Qualifying went well as my first flyer ended up being a pole lap, beating David by a few hundredths or so. Sadly, he wouldn't have any of that and went out for one more flyer and took the pole (and the lap record) from me by .006! It was crushing, but I was really happy to be in the front row and best of all with my teammate right behind me so I didn't have to worry about getting bumped by anyone taking a risk.
The start went as expected and I came out through the first set of turns behind David. I was sure he was 3-stopping from his practice stint lengths, but I figured he was on mediums at least, maybe hards, since he wasn't like a whole second faster than me. Turned out he ran softs which ended up working to my advantage. I tailed David very closely for the first 10 or 11 laps without making any attempt to overtake, but I tried to make him think that I was considering it so that he'd drive hard and gobble up tires while I coasted in his draft. It worked perfectly and, as it turned out, being in his pocket for the first stint reduced my own tire wear a lot. His tires started to lose grip around lap 12 or so and mine were in perfect shape for driving still, so I made my move in the final turn and made it stick through the next complex. We had some really crazy side-to-side action for the first half lap but after I had the position sealed in the T5/6 left/right sweeping section, I knew he would back off to save tires and he did.
I can only recall one really scary moment which was later in the first stint when I was starting to decide to attack David, I came in through T15 (the last turn between the two straights) and had more speed than I expected to have on David and I bumped him ever so lightly in the rear end. It was really soft so I am hoping he didn't take anything from it. I, however, took right front suspension damage. It didn't change the handling in any way, but when I went for my first pit, I forgot about that and my stop took 12 seconds because of the damage which I didn't need fixed in the first place. If I had lost by less than 6 seconds, this would have been a dire oversight!
Skipping forward, the rest of the race was really solid for me and nearing my final pit stop, I had about 18 seconds on P2 Tim McArthur. I really didn't think I was going to make it out in front of him after my final pit and I was pretty sure that if I didn't, I'd have blown the win because he surely was fast enough to hold me off. Fortunately, I made it into T1 with about 1.5s on him and used a little boost to keep him off of me while my tires were still warming up. The gap started to grow as I lapped really hard on my 3-stop tank so that I could create some space.
With about 5 or so laps to go, my gap started shrinking from 6s into the 3s range and I was worried that he was boosting it up to try and make a last minute kamikaze run. I just put my nose down and concentrated and managed to maintain a 4-5s gap until he spun with around 3 laps to go and then I wound it down to boost 1 and rolled it home without any fancy business.
I was uber disappointed about not taking pole, but the win sure made up for it. APR is in position to challenge for the Team Championship now leading into Canada.