12 - Japan GP (Suzuka) - Event Thread

Well I bought Elite Dangerous this week so have been playing that constant, I like Suzuka and was just going to jump straight in to the last practice session before qualifying. Anyway, now my machine wont let me extract the new track to my drive? I made some changes this week to make ELite run smoother but it looks as though it means I miss the race sorry guys, I really like Suzuka too, I will be at the next race!

I had a medium good start and some nice battles in the first laps until i lost my car and got 12th right behind Arek who also was on med tires. I stayed right behind him and we made it to P3/4. Then in lap 10 I spun into the first corner and Antonio drove my front wing off. I had to do one lap without frontwing.
Right before i arrived the pits i noticed its only lap 10 so i need to do one soft stint for 9 laps. I managed to do it by slowing down in the esses. Then on last stint i fully attacked and got back to P5 with some nice battles with Denis and Black. I think that was my max anyway since Arek and Antonio seemed to be a bit faster. Good race at all

Very exciting race for me even though things didn't go as well as I would like to.

I had a very weak Q session. Crashed and spun on my first two hot laps so I lost all the confidence I had and then during my 3rd attempt I just tried to complete the lap to set time whatever it would be, just not to start from the back. It turned out it was enough for me to start 8th what in this case wasn't that bad

I had Lau and the other fast guys in front of me so my plan was just to have a good start on meds then stick to them, do two more laps (in case they were on softs) and try to overtake as many as i could during the pit stop and then switch to soft and push till the end like crazy, but unfortunatelly I got hit by someone in T1 and fell down to the penultimate place...

I didn't lose much timethough  so I rejoined the group pretty quickly and started overtaking the guys and taking adventage of their mistakes. Very soon after that Sven joined me and we made a nice run which let us jump very high in the standings before the first pit stop.

But even before the pit stop was done Sven had crashed and left our shared adventure. 

Then I focused on chasing Tom who was second. I was slowly reducing the gap to him but finally after many laps I got right on his tail and the battle begun... It was a tough one and had 2 phases. The first phase ended after he rammed me making me spun at the harpin and ran away like a chicken.  Then he got slowed down by one of the backmarkers having trouble and I rejoined him. Thx for that!  

The fight was very tough again. On the last lap I had kind of bad exit from the spoon corner where Tom tried to force a mistake on me (we both went side by side through there) and there was a risk he could overtake me on the straight so I decided to lift up and let him go and overtake him at 130R to humilitate him badly for making me spin earlier (it wasn't a big risk though but the perspective of laughing at him after that was very tempting so...) 

Unfortunatelly I missjudged that shit and didn't make it side by side before the curve even though I was really close.  Tom went a normal line so I had to lift up to not crash being on the inside but I was still having another chance in the final chicane but I lost traction of my rear on the exit and he finished right in front of me...

Anyway if the battle for the championship was still on I wouldn't have done such a thing so he was lucky

Congrats to Joe for a lucky win. He knows why. 
Big thx to Adrian who couldn't race today for his support that let me have such a strong pace and result!  

Talk about going full goof  

Went off on lap 1 not expecting the lack of grip on the freezing tyres... got about 5 laps in after making a stop for damage and realise in my haste to get to the server I had forgotten to turn on rfscan. 

Just a long list of errors from me. I'll be better prepared next time. 

- Oscar.

No worries, Oscar. The first race in the league is usually pretty bad for most drivers..

Our next race is only in 14 days from now, so you'll have plenty of time to get better prepared for it and hopefully have some actual fun as well!