Qualifying Merchant
It happened again.
Pole, in spec cars, by six tenths. Absolutely nailed the setup and gave myself an indisputable advantage in straight line speed going into the race. Lapse in judgement. Win gone.
At the moment the simracing group I'm apart of are doing a sort of series of races. We've each decided on a car and track. Two names are pulled, take the first's car, the second's track, and see what sort of chaos we get out of it. The most recent round:
I threw the car through an aero calculator and it made more downforce than the 1997 F1 cars we used in the race before. The mod itself doesn't seem to be anything special, just big numbers on the BMW M3 GTR in base game GTR2, dressed up like a Cadillac.
As a group, we've all become somewhat lazy and careless about these races. We all showed up basically on the dot of when we were meant to start, then dragged it out another hour practicing. I spent most of that hour lost at where to go setup wise, unable to really get the car comfortable. First I tried running the car trimmed out for the immensely long main straight. But I scrubbed too much speed through T1, and was lost through the slower second sector. Going higher on dowforce somewhat helped top speed, getting a better exit out of the final turn and scrubbing much less through turn 1, but still didn't help through the second sector.
After an hour of floundering, getting as close as 2 seconds off the pace, the setup came together in the last five minutes of qualifying. The insane amounts of downforce seemed to drown out every other input which disguised how hard each axle was braking. Corner entry understeer turning into exit oversteer appeared to be caused by too much rear braking, causing the car to rotate without slowing down and by the time I’d scrubbed speed to change direction, I was at the outside wall for the corner exit, still out of shape. A very bizarre feeling and a prime example of a point I touched upon in my previous post, where a car somewhere extreme on the stability spectrum can appear to be on the other end. Too much braking on the rear axle took away confidence to turn in, tricking me into going the wrong way on bias and adjusting my entry to the corner.
With the bias sorted I started wringing more speed out of it, and the car started behaving more reasonably. I pulled off all the rear wing, and then compensated on the springs and bars to keep it stable. There wasn't really enough range to keep the rear planted, but it was perfectly driveable and only really slid in the low speed corners in a predictable and manageable way. Pole by six tenths. The only car to break the 1 minute mark. "I'm a genius!" etc. etc.
The setup gave me 6mph top speed improvement over the next fastest car which is no small benefit with the straights of High Speed Ring and a godsend when defending from the slipstream. 100L of fuel was loaded in for a 45 minute fuel saving race. Some elected to pit, but I felt some lift and coast was safer and faster than dealing with my sketchy track record of slowing a car down and fiddling with the pit menu. I launched the car well enough to hold the lead. The field settled into a comfortable train.
Second to last corner, a totally flat out curve to the right that fed into the final corner. The rear walked out on me without either warning and without any violence or drama. I turned in, the front went, the rear didn't, and the result was a beautiful pirouette along the racing line, coming to a stop with a train of cars aimed directly for me. Panic shouting down the mic, complaints of aero damage, feint apologies were said.
The next few laps was about managing the oversteer I was now vividly aware of, now running last. But the car was fast and fuel would burn off to bring the balance in order. Most of the other competitors were going to stop to help fuel my belief that I could win. I passed second to last on lap 4 in an overly ambitious move to avoid getting held up through turn 2, and continued to drive away. Only this time, instead of neatly spinning to the middle of the road, the car spun tight towards the inside barrier, which should’ve caught me. There was no conscious decision, but perhaps I did something to even intentionally steer the car for a shallow impact with the barrier to keep momentum.
Instead of a nice, shallow, barrier impact, my car phased through the wall which apparently had no collision, straight into a very solid bridge support, ending my race.
This is my party trick. I can throw a setup together that feels great, and I can't remember the last time I qualified badly because I have an uncanny ability to line up all my quick sectors together when the time comes. It'd be absurd to call me a quick driver, if you're reading this, in outright pace you're probably faster than I, but somehow my speed all comes together when the session's ticking down. On the flipside cannot get a car to lap consistently. It’s not even due to edgy setups or treating every lap like a qualifying lap because this has been a theme across all sorts of cars. I’ll always have a lapse in judgement, in the pit lane, or overtaking, or around track limits, I’ve always got to rely on others to make mistakes with me to win, or to have some sort of absurd and unfair advantage.
But at least I can brag about pole. ;)