Following on from a busy week 1 I was able to get some more racing done in week two. The week wasn’t as successful as week 1 in terms of points, but I still had two good races.
Star Mazda Race Results (iRacing members only!)
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This was my first official race at Sebring, and despite liking the track I really struggled to find my pace here.
I went into a race and started in 13th of 16 (despite matching my PB in qualifying!). I had a pretty good race though – kept it on the black stuff and picked up places when the faster guys dropped off the circuit. I had a few interesting battles on the track with much faster drivers. My car had a very low downforce setup and despite being much slower in the corners I was still able to pull away on the straights – even when my rival was firmly in my slipstream. Such a cool way that you can have two cars with completely different setups challenging each other on the track in very different ways.
I soaked up lap after lap of pressure and eventually brought it home for an 8th place finish for 108 points (better than I expected!). Another zero incident race too, and a whole single point of iRating to the good!
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Hmmm.
I was really looking forward to this race as I found I had a strong setup that actually had me running closer to the sharp end than I usually run. Was looking for a strong finish. As you can see from the video of the lap 1 start, the race was ruined before it started when someone in the outside pacing lane span their wheels on the green flag and barrelled into my car, destroying my right front alignment.
I never recovered from the reset and finished 10th, one lap down. 68 points and a mandatory 4x incident (mandatory in a sense that it seems every truck race results in a minimum of a 4x hit somewhere….) In future I now know what I should do when resetting to make sure I don’t go a lap down.
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At the end of the week I found I had just enough time to squeeze in a Skippy race at VIR Full. Despite it being a challenging track I found it easy to get back into the feel of the track and only needed a handful of laps to get back to my previous pace here.
I started 9th in a full field of 14 and did well to avoid incidents throughout the race. There was some lap one spinners that I had to navigate around and some passing made as I worked my way back up through the field.
I had a nightmare spin on lap 2 as I passed a slower car – I got my braking perfectly into turn 1 and I had given the corner quite a large margin of respect but annoyingly I used more steering wheel than I needed to and lost the car with a lazy spin.
Later in the race I saw the craziest set of collisions I’ve ever seen. I arrived at the top of a crest to find around four cars all basically parked and slowly getting back onto the racing surface. A comedy of errors ensued as they took turns to collide into each other, and even flipping one car! I tip-toed through the carnage and drove on to a 6th place finish which was good for 100 points.
