Week Ten – Solstice @ Lime Rock Park (for the last time!)

My Helmet Design Lime Rock Park

Week ten saw the series return to Lime Rock Park for the third and final time. I think this week will actually be the very last time I take a Solstice out at LRP. Not that I don’t like the Solstice (I love it!) but because I don’t get on very well with LRP. There’s something about this short track that requires full commitment and sheer bravery to lap at the very fast laptimes. So many corners are fast entry with very limited run off area, and this combination means that any mistake is usually going to result in a very fast accident, and usually a wall or hard object involved at some point! A 99% lap at LRP is worth almost nothing – I find I can lose a second easily, unless I’m at 100%, ragged edge driving.

I had considered not racing this week, but felt I should at least give it a cursory race, just for the sake of completion. I had a race of 92 points to beat to increase my season tally so far.

I did a few quali sessions to warm up and joined a sparsely populated race session. I was gridded #1 and saw two much faster drivers, so I was a bit dejected and saw the race as a poor opportunity to increase my season score. It wasn’t so bad though, as I started the race from third and managed to steal second place at turn one, thanks to second place running out of road and going cross country. The rest of the race was uneventful – the highlight being seeing the fast second place driver rejoin the order in third place with a handful of laps to go. I had to do some quick sums in my head to calculate how much of a threat he would be, and also what pace I needed to run to be safe. My laptime always goes south in the second half of a race at LRP (a result or tyre overheating, or wear, I don’t know) but it just about worked out OK and I took a comfortable second place result, with no incidents.

Race Results (iRacing members only!)

Race score 109 points, which coincidentally is now my lowest weekly result, so it now becomes the next benchmark to beat as we go to week eleven – back to Laguna Seca!

New Solstice Paintscheme Sep 08

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