After Magny-Cours I was pretty confident of my pace as proved previously and was looking forward to making some lost ground up in Germany. I have always liked the circuit with its relatively high speed straights and fast flowing corners. The last time I was at Hockenheim I won a race and got punted off in the other so I had mixed thoughts! (more…)
Tagged ‘Hockenheim’
Hockenheim Round 4
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010Hockenheim Race 1
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
After a two thirty minutes practice the car was pretty much set up to how I would like, just making a few minor tweaks for the qualifying session upcoming later on in that day. I qualified 2nd national for the first race which was only one row behind Gabriel Dias (my main competitor). Unfortunately I did not get the best out of the car and did not hook all of my best sectors up which would have put me on the same sort of pace as Gabriel or even faster but due to yellow flags at the last corner this was made more difficult.
Going into the first race I was optimistic about a decent result as I could show the pace on a longer run and knew I had a more consistent car than Gabriel. The conditions were pretty decent and reasonably warm, this meant warming the tyres up weren’t much of an issue. Coming onto the grid I made sure I had a few practice starts in the plan to get into 1st place by the first corner with a good start. After the lights went out I managed to get away very well and did end up getting into first place by the first corner and overtaking 3 cars by the 2nd corner. After a good exit I managed to get a good slipstream down the back straight and succeeded in getting up a few more places before the main harpin down the straight. Under the braking zone I saw in my periferal vision a load of smoke and seeing three cars spinning coming down the inside in which I narrowly avoided and putting me back many places from this.
After chasing back down Gabriel for 1st place I gained position only to loose it again the next lap by a mistake on my behalf. While battling closely I saw a chance to regain track position into the stadium complex, Gabriel seemed to have missed a gear in which I went down the inside only to find Gabriel turning into me and having contact which spun me into the gravel. Unfortunately I could not get restarted and that was the end of the race for me. While walking to the barrier I also saw Gabriel had stopped to which I found out later that he had a Differential problem and he was slowing down out of the previous corner due to that. Gabriel apologised for his lack of awareness in which I accepted and did realise he turned into me without seeing me there.
After that whole race I still managed to pull an extra point out on him from my fastest lap so some good came out of the race!
Hockenheim Race 2
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
After a night of rain and a morning of wind there was a drying circuit for qualifying two. After some set up ideas and changes I put the car on pole by over half a second, and put myself 3 cars in front on the grid.
After another rainy morning and similar situations to qualifying I was in for a hard race in hard conditions. My plan was to push and stay out of trouble and try and bring the car home in first without too many hitches. With a sprained wrist from the previous race warming the tyres was a hard task to do and was especially important being a wet drying circuit, fortunately for me I was on the dry side of the start finish line.
I managed to get a great start making many places up again by the first corner and staying out of trouble which was the most important thing. I got up to 7th place overall and stayed in 1stplace national but the occasion international car came past in the first 5 laps before the race seemed to have settled down. After battling with Henry Arundel I was pushing very hard to keep with him I started looking at the pit board to see what the gap to the 2nd national was and every lap it increased by about 2-4 seconds. After a fairly lonely race which was pretty hard going as was very difficult conditions the chequered flag came out in which I took first place national and 10th place overall and having nearly a 50 second lead to the second national (Gabriel Dias)
Great race scoring 21 points and 6 more than my closest rival Gabriel Dias, extending my lead to 49 points in total.
