Season 30: Specials. Round 3: Road Atlanta 34 laps (71 Can Am cars)

Rd 3 at Rd Atlanta.  Of the available cars I picked the Shadow, it's pretty fast despite being a little difficult to drive sometimes.  I don't have a huge amount of experience at this track, it's nice though.  It twists and turns around a hill, with a technical section and a twisty straight leading into a difficult braking area for the last corner.  Qualifying went fairly ok, it took me a few runs to get the car down to a proper laptime in Qual setup. I the final stages of qualifying Greg took pole position by a fraction of a second from me, so he lined up on the grid on the right hand side.

I got a pretty good start, and so did Greg, as we drove into the first turn, and up hill right hander, I made sure to stay wide.  unfortunately Greg lost control and spun his car across the track.  For a moment I thought he would spin across in front of me and onto the grass but he seems to stop just in front of my car.  I tried to slow and move to the right, but it was no use and I gently collided with him.  Unfortunately some network lag made the hit worse than it was and I ended up upside down.  By the time I got going again I was dead last, and since I'd used my one reset I had to come into the pits at the end of the lap to serve a stop go penalty.  That really put me last.

It took a while, but I eventually calmed down and started to put in some solid lap times, I passed a couple of cars that had spun, and started to think I could salvage something from the race.  But then as I got past Jani I came down the start finish straight, and just as I started to brake for turn one the engine blew up.  That was that, no more resets were allowed so my race was over.  Tragically just one lap before half distance so I scored no points at all.  Greg chased Carlos in the mighty M8F all the way home to the finish without quite catching him.

I guess my main mistake was not checking the rev counter during practice to see if I was overrevving the car under braking (my wheel obscures the small dial in the shadow).  That was a foolish thing to do, and I paid the price.  I guess I could have anticipated better Greg spinning in turn 1 as well, I knew that corner is tricky on the inside line.  Now we have to wait a month before we go to Le Mans.  I like Le Mans a lot. I've driven there many times, and won a lot at that track.  So we'll see what happens, because if the season doesn't turn around soon it's going to get very depressing for me.  At least you can have two mulligans in a season, so that's one I guess.

Mixed Mod - Drivers Championship (scoring)
Scoring Scheme Must complete 50% of largest number of laps (rounded up) complete to score Best 8 scores count Points: 50, 43, 37, 32, 28, 25, 23, 21, 19, 17, 15, 13, 11, 9, 7, 5, 3, 2, 1
Rank	Drivers	PP	Total	Vehicle
1	GregT (FT)		143.0	*Mixture*	50.0	50.0	43.0
2	Cookie (FT)		97.0	*Mixture*	37.0	28.0	32.0
3	Mark Jones (FT)		86.0	*Mixture*	43.0	43.0
4	Carlos Cendejas (FT)		75.0	*Mixture*		25.0	50.0
5	Doni Yourth (FT)		65.0	*Mixture*	28.0	37.0
6	Jani Posta (FT)		48.0	*Mixture*		23.0	25.0
7	Tom van Ostade (R1)		37.0	Lola T222			37.0
8	AnGex (R1)		32.0	Matra MS80 (DF…		32.0
= 8	Walter Conn (R1)		32.0	Porsche 910	32.0
10	DLogan (FT)		28.0	Shadow MKll			28.0
	bagrupp (R1)