1h of Spain

Someone down at my ISP is gonna get a bloody good kicking Monday morning!!!!!!!!!!

Fun for me, being able to race against my long-time rival and many-time team mate; Scott Whitestine. We both decided the evening prior to just run the Elise's and just enjoy the drive. Had a great time until this connection gave up... then the Elise becomes a boring, tedious task in solo mode. The hardest part is staying out of the way of all the "big boys"

Short race report...

Did a, for me, respectable qualification at 1.37.8 I believe.
After some 28 min, i find myself in 6 th position, right behind 5th and 4th when I pitted for fuel and new tires. My crew were good today and let me out before Enis who was in 4th.... Then a stop and go penalty? What? One lap and in again... One more! One lap and in again.... Got out in 13-15th position and managed to get up into 7th or so before my engine suddenly blew on the main straight. One of 5 engines I saw blev in the first 40 min or so!

GTR1... here I come :-)

PS: I believe I got the penalties because I was not under 60 km when I entered the pit area.

Spain turned out to be a good time for me, since it was my 1st race w/ GTR2. Picked the 350Z (seems a little underpowered compared to the other NGT cars, then again maybe it's me, lol). Server seemed to work well. Only had 2 cars standing still and one ghost car towards the middle of the race (could see the drivers name, but no car), fun event. Looking forward to the season using GTR2.

Nice race for me. I went with the Lambo, I figured it's one of the easiest cars to get used to quickly. Claus spent a number of laps behind me looking for a passing spot and found it when I had a slightly slow exit to the main straight when lapping a backmarker. We pitted on the same lap and I nearly got out ahead, but not quite. I kept trying to chase but that didn't work out. Still I'm happy with the third place, Samuel and his Saleen being quite untouchable this time.

It was a pretty fun race all in all. I chose the blue viper which is faster than the rest but has pirellis on and i have never been able to figure out those tires.

Fortunately, they were pretty good in qualifying and got a 1.37.9 which is good by my standards :).

With the race started, i was just mainly cruising in 8th i think. I was on a different strategy from everyone else it seemed since i was using an enduro setup with fuel filled 9/10s of the way up to see how the car would handle after a long run. Well, the car started handling like shit after a few laps thanks to the pirellis. On one lap coming out of turn 4, my rear jumped out from behind me and kept wiggling the car back and forth trying to save which i eventually did but gave the position up to Steve. So, for most of the race, i was just following Steve around until he went into the pits. Eventually, everybody in front of me went in and i took the lead with a good amount of fuel left. About 10 laps later, i went into the pits and got a stop-go penalty for speeding. That was pretty weird because i thought i had slowed down before the white line, so im not sure if you have to slow down even further before the white or at the very beginning of pit road where you see the green lights. Anyway, i came around again for the penalty, went into my box, pressed enter to receive the penalty and right there i was booted back to the main screen where it said i DNFed....WTF? I didnt even press ESC, only ENTER....oh well, that ended that.

I wanna add something else.....i want to apologize to Chip for running him off the road in turn 4. I surely didnt mean to do this, i had no grip in the tires and before i entered the turn, the car got loose and the only way to save it was for me to take up more track and unfortunately, you were there :(. So sorry again for that.

Qualified with 1:37.1, but car was pushing like a pig. Understeer all over the place. :(

Accidently took Soft slicks for race. :) It was "fun".

Menaged to keep up with CJ and Ari for couple of laps, but then car started to understeer REALLY badly. Had some good fight with Kent.

After pitstop suddenly I had splitting headache, I could barely think LOL, like understeering wasn't enough. I was behid Steve now. After cutting his advantage for about 8-10 laps I got behind him. Stayed there for whole lap, and when we exited on main straight, I slipstreamed him and put myself in overtaking position. I was on the inside, menaged to overtake Steve, but then suddenly we touched and Steve went off. I couldn't see it being my fault, but if it was I'm really sorry Steve.

Finished 4th, 1 min behind winner (Krueger), considering that I haven't practiced for a single lap there it wasn't bad.

Grats Krueger and all class winners.

Congrats to the winners of the 1st unofficial GTR2 race. :)
I had a great time driving my old BMW GTR from S2. Love the gear whine, just like Hans Stuck at Nordschleife video. Wish this M3 GTR had the 750hp V12 Hans had on his record run. :)
Can't wait for S4 with GTR2 to start.
Cu guys at the next race.

Dan

Nice race , everything worked out pretty well , only had 1 ghost car which i hit slightly , but all in all it worked pretty much like GTR1 sessions usually.

Decided to test how far i can go with 1 set of tires and took only fuel in pits after 30 mins. To my amazement , car was handling pretty good through the race with medium tires all around , sure it got slower but it was drivable all the time :) . Saleen seem to be very nice car now with new tiremodel , absolutely my favorite atm...

Race went pretty straight forward , from pole to lead and managed to build some gap between me and the other GT1. Conor had a different pitstrategy and that was interesting to chase him down , but when he had to go into pits , i had a nice 15 second lead to next car. Gap went down slowly , but onle few laps to go , there weren't any problems to finish 1st this time.

Racing was nice and specially lapping situations were much more in control now with GTR2 , things went very smoothly and enjoyed every moment :D.

Thx for the fun and congratulations to all finishers and podium places.

------
Samuel

'Twas a GTR2 learning experience, my first onliner with GTR2.

Did some playing with all the cars and testing for the race here and there offline. Pretty sure I went online at least once just to make sure I could connect and everything. GTR2 was running fine on my system.

I connect for the race, and got about half a lap in practice when suddenly my frame rates drop to what must've been ... 2. Aaah, geez. Is this GTR2 multiplayer for me? I back out, reduce some details. Go back in, and don't get the same problem but do get it shaky in spots. I back out again, figure how to toggle MoTeC, go back in for some laps ...

Now, when I toggle MoTeC, I'm expecting the display to go blank. But it doesn't. Back in. Back out. Takes me a bit to see that MoTeC is toggling off, and just freezing the screen at its last state.

Anyway, you know what? In the end I'm not not convinced the initial frame rate problems were due to my settings, but I did pretty much waste the entire practice session putzing around with this or that and wondering if I was going to make it.

So, on to the race. Qualified decently, I suppose. I started smoking after a few laps so had to lay off and cruise to the pits. I had another second in me I was pretty sure, but then would've been only two seconds off the leaders ... I just stayed in.

Formation lap ... frame rates seemed OK, and in fact that was the last time I thought of it.

My laps were pretty uneventful, just driving the car against the track, dealing with traffic. (I don't know where you other Vette drivers were finding that speed ... Please, by all means post your setups so that I may humiliate myself with the confirmation that, yeah, no, it's not the setup :-)

I pitted poorly. Oh, I pulled in just fine ... but then suddenly I'm out of my car and evidently lounging on a hoverchair sipping a soda or something. I'm expecting the crew to change tires first, but no, they're waiting for to me to shut off the motor so they can begin fueling. And either the starter/ignition buttons don't work the same as GTR or I mapped 'em wrong, but I had to slap my keyboard a few times before things finally got going.

The Vette was a blast to drive, though. I'm glad we had the fun run so I could take it out.

It was a good run. No spins for me, no offs. I thought everyone did well with these cars. Congrats to the winners.