13 Oct 2011: Suzuka

MikaRaymond wrote:is anyone else having problems with rear grip / overheating / degredation?

MikaRaymond wrote:is anyone else having problems with rear grip / overheating / degredation?

M Waechter wrote:I'm even thinking about to not take part in racing anymore , because of saving (cool down) some of my nerves with all this addidional 'pressure' when driving,
(it affects even my heart -little heart-issues was always an issue for me caused by the nerves-, / I'm getting too "old" for all this driving beside all the other things that are to do also).

MikaRaymond wrote:joking aside, if you find it difficult to even press the brake pedal then should you even be walking on it?

MikaRaymond wrote:health comes first mate. ..

iRacingNews wrote:
Nearly 250 iRacers took advantage of last Saturday’s 2011 iRacing.com Japan Grand Prix at Suzuka International Circuit to see if they could “be like Jenson” — ie Jenson Button, who scored his third win of the 2011 World Drivers Championship at Suzuka on Sunday.
Sebastian Schmalenbach (DE-AT-CH) topped the highest strength of field race of the day, leading 35 of 53 laps en route to an 8.716s victory over Rudy van Buren (Benelux) with Jake Stergios (New England) another .7s adrift of van Buren’s Williams-Toyota FW31.

After the previous F1 event at Spa where i got 2nd i was looking forward to this event and challenge to get a step higher on the podium. Towards the weekend i did quite some quali running earlyer in the week, until i came to a point where i didnt have the time to practice on for the races. On the race day i had some visitors during the day and wasnt really able to do the race practice that i wanted, but on that point i thought i still had 2 hours to go and could do some valueble running in that time. Though after this Quali session Jake told me that the race was starting in 5 minuts so i was confused and found out that i checked the times wrong. I thought it said the GMT time so i needed to add 2 hours on it, but it was already in there so it was a bit of a rush to go into the race with about 10 laps on race fuel in.

All in all i didnt have the best qualifing and ended up in p5 on the grid. The start was decent and i could keep my position during the first hafe of the stint until the lack or practice started to grab me with a set that got to much understear during the middle of the stint towards the end. That combined with the fact that on a track like this overtaking is pretty difficult with the downforce lost wenn u are close to a car infront made it hard to attack, and eventually i let Jake by who was behind me and had more pace wich gave me the 6th position entering the first rounds of pitstops.

After the pitstops i ended in the same position as i went in, but i could stick a slightly better pace and go to the front with Jake who about 1 second infront of me at that time. The whole stint we had a good pace together and since i was 2 laps heaver i could pass him in the pitstops and we ended up in p2 and 3 going into the last stint.

During the stint we were able to close the gap a slight bit towards the leader, but he did he job well in the first stint wenn he was in clear air and opend up the gap wich was never possible to close for us. The race ended in p2 for me and 3 for jake.

All in all a slightly disapointing result from my side, i defenatly hoped for more in this race and im sure with some more practice time in the win could have been possible, we showed compaireble pace to the race winner in stint 2 and 3, so all together the starting position and practice time caught us both out in the race.