Cancer Research Bahrain Grand Prix

Great race all, Grats Tim on the championship and Tim and Todd for Vindex Team Championship.

Spun on the grid falling to last, passed Todd and worked my way up to Hienz. Had a little dicing with Hienz before I finally got it right. Justin drove like Justine and handed me 4th with a spin out of T2.

Rest of the race was pretty boring although I made a change to teh fuel on the last stop and drove very conservatively to make the tires last.

Not a great season for my first but showed some decent speed here and there.

Pretty dissapointing to finish behind Conor in the final standings considering Conor only ran 2 races. Obviously I have some serious leaning to be done if I ever intend to compete for podiums in this series.

Thanks R2P

Congrats to Tim on the Season championship, and again, Vindex taking the Team championship...

I just wanted to finish this one .. Cant believe 2 in a row for me, this time my own fault.

For some reason, backend got very fussy after first stop, and i lost it with justin following me, and then the following lap same corner, but put it in the wall quite hard, and broke rear of the car, was impossible getting back to pitlane..

Very happy with my season finish position, Well done to Apex predator racing with a solid Team finish aswell. Thanks to justin for filling in the latter part of the season for darren.

Hopefully, S9 Apex can front a solid attack to Vindex and GTNDC .. looking forward.

Congrats to all.. See ya s9

Edit: well done on the win Conor!!

My first F1 season was a real exciting learning experience. My expectations were to try and finish in the top 10 in the driver standings and finishing 6th was a pleasing result. Great driving by everyone this season, thanks for coming out and making this series the most fun I've had sim racing to date. I am even more excited about Season 9. I've got a good bit of experience in these cars now and I know almost all of the tracks fairly well so I can go into each event from now on able to get competitive laps fairly quickly instead of having to spend 2 or 3 solid sessions just to get even close to decent times.

As for this race, it wasn't too exciting obviously. I really should have been in contention for 4th place if not 3rd, but early in the race I made 3 stupid errors because my mind was wondering (that's the added challenge of small grids). As such, I spend the whole race mostly just trying to close up on Kent to try and battle for fourth, but while I was faster almost every lap, it just wasn't enough to fight back in the end because of my running 3 stops while most if not all did 2 stops. Great driving by Kent. I really pushed very hard for the last half of the race but he didn't give an inch. I was able to pull him in by a half second per lap or so (because of the shorter stints) but it all depended on his making a single crucial mistake for me to have a chance and he finished up very solidly. Good show.

Congrats to Connor and all the usual suspects.

Well done to Tim and VWI for the championships. I'd like to see Fisher team up with someone so we can have a 4-way team championship competition going on next season.

Fun race today, especially in the first stint. Tim could of just hung back and raced for third place which would of secured the championship, but he went for the win and raced hard so I thought that was a pretty cool thing to do. A lot of VERY close side by side racing during those first 12 laps, and some more after the pit stops. Conor, Tim and I were within a half second of each other for most of those laps. I knew I was in trouble early on though when I found out they were on a two stop strategy, and I just didn't have the setup to stay with them today.

Looking at the replay, they actually seemed to have more downforce than I did (a surprise), and were closing fast in the second sector, especially that long, slow left hander. Need to remember that for next season.

Finished a lucky 2nd, and two points behind Tim for the championship. Last year I was four behind, so next season should be my turn again. :-) Silverstone (double downshift blew engine) and Canada (brake failure) were the two races that really killed my title hopes. Probably lost 13-15 points between the two of them. Italy (no further comment) was another lost opportunity. I had some bad race starts (no excuse for that), and was also outsmarted with setups and strategy in a few races. Lot's of drama though, just like the real thing, and I enjoyed another great season of F1 racing. Good to see some of the other guys showing a lot of improvement too.

Congratulations to Tim again on the driver's title, and to Todd and TIm for the team title. Also congratulations to Conor for his first F1 win today.

Already looking forward to Silverstone on the 13th. :-)

Glad I didn't vote against running the race :). That turned out to be blast and to get my first win in this series was just icing on the cake. Better yet, I didn't get discoed! It was unfortunate that we didn't get the numbers like in previous races but the quality of drivers in this one made up for that. If anything, it was harder for anyone who wasn't the leader to fight for it since there was no traffic to bottleneck anything. So we had to be on top of our game to compete for the win.

I thought Tim had this one in the bag. In practice for most of the week, he could easily get down into the 28s on two stop fuel. I was on the same strategy (but with mediums) and was about 1/2-1 seconds slower and we both thought that Fisher would be on a 3 stopper so I expected to see Tim out in front for a lot of the race.

Interestingly enough, that wasn't really the case. From the get go, Dave, Tim, and I were nose to tail and running equal times. Dave and Tim were swapping positions regularly while I stayed behind them and waited for one of them to make a mistake. I didn't put too much pressure for the lead and maybe only tried to pass one of them once during the first stint but pulled back and continued to wait. Around lap 12, Dave went in for his stop so I was then in pursuit of Tim. Wasn't faster than him but I kept him within sight. Prior to the stop on lap 18 I closed in on him very rapidly which shocked me a little bit and almost ran into him. We both came in on the same lap but to my disadvantage, we both had the same pit stall and I came in right behind him so I had to waste 7 seconds to wait for Tim to get his service before I got mine. Took on some extra fuel since I was not able to make my target lap of 19 and came out with a good size deficit to Dave and Tim.

The car wasn't as good as it needed to be in the second stint. I guess I needed to open the brake ducts a little more because they were hot and I was having slight brake fades going into the deep braking corners, which surprised me a bit since I am not a heavy braker. Fortunately, I kept Dave and Tim within sight after the mistake in the pits and because they continued to battle hard for the lead, it made my life easier. Tim and I coordinated our stops on TS to make sure we didn't come in at the same time. It surprised me a bit that he was coming a lap earlier than I was scheduled to come in and with the way he was planning his stops, he wasn't going to make it with 17 gallons of fuel per stop. So I didn't know what he was planning.

After the final stop, I didn't gain a whole lot on Tim for the lead but I didn't lose a whole lot either. We were running similar times and there was any differences, they were only by a few tenths each lap. I kept trying hard to catch up to him but my braking situation was getting worse and I just couldn't throw the car around the corners as well as in the first part of the race.

Getting close to the end of the race, Tim went wide coming out of the very quick and long right hander and lost a lot of time. I closed up right on his bumper going into the final corner and coming out of it, he gave it up to me. So the next few laps, I owned the lead but didn't have it for long as Tim went by me going into T3. I didn't put up much of a fight and just let him by since he was much faster.

With a few laps left, there was a point where I got by him again for the lead (can't remember, lol) and I started putting a good lead on him since he found out he couldn't make it and tried to conserve as much fuel as possible. On the last lap, he pitted so all I had to do was cruise home for the victory. However, I just about wrecked on the back straight as my anti virus popped up and started download some definitions which caused my computer to stutter dramatically. "Fuck", I thought...one more thing to try and screw me out of a win. But I kept it cool and straight as possible since I had a 20 second lead. 5 seconds later, the stuttering went away and I was finally able to cruise home for the victory. Phew! :)

Great race all in all. Learned a lot for next season and I am quite happy that I have a good pace to compete for wins. Hopefully I can continue with it.

Cya at Silverstone in two weeks :)