2015 S1 - Francorchamps - Results and Post Race

I guess that's what I get for not practicing at all until about an hour before qualifying, not much of a fight for the front from my end. My race was bookended with excitement. In the beginning when Chris and Alfonso got together I saw daylight on the outside and I did my best days of thunder close my eyes and drive through it attempt, luckily Alfonso just tapped the side of my car as I went by and I didn't notice any damage. After that it was just pounding out laps. I tried to gain some time back on the second pit stop but I took too much fuel and I changed my rear tires which ended up taking more time then fuel did, so I lost about 10 seconds worth of track time to Paul. Then with about 2 to go, I was coming to Les Combes and noticed Ray was right in the middle of the track facing the wrong way, I tried to go on the outside at the same time he decided to pull forward and he hit me square on the driver side. I then bounced off and hit the wall on the right side. It was down on straight line speed but the steering was straight Luckily there was a good gap back to Glen and I could nurse the car to the end and stay in 5th position.

I was dreadful - about my expected pace but ridiculously sloppy with spins (3 the last three attempts at the final chicane alone) and 1xs for minor offs. I apologize for those that had to contend with me being erratic and especially to Greg whom I speared with a lap or to to go. It was only circumstance that it didn't cost him any positions.

The start was a bit frenetic and there were a couple spins and especially one where I was getting slow car in the middle of the track warnings and had trailing cars pass me on either side making us three wide approaching an undefined incident. I think people should have been a bit less aggressive, especially on lap 1. I had some moments of racing with Steve(?) Maestro trying to pass early on but I pitted early rather than deal with it and it worked because I came out of the pit exchange ahead until my late race blunders.

Hi Claude,

No problem raising the question - it's a good topic for discussion. When you compare the rest of us against drivers like Rob Thaeler (3 incidents) and Mike Erter (6 incidents) it seems like they were penalized for not driving aggressively enough.

I believe that the Tuesday night series has started talking about adding penalty points after you reach a certain threshold of incidents, and I'm of the opinion that we should talk about doing something similar for our series. I wouldn't change the rules this season of course, but no doubt for season 2 we should talk about the possibility of adopting either a black flag or penalty point to curb the aggressive driving. I think this would also help advance our philosophy of the "gentleman racer" so it's a little more meaningful in light of the championship. Stay tuned for more on this later ...

First of all, I want to apologize to William fort the tap in the last chicane early in the race while he was trying to pass another car from the inside. I gave his position back on the straight after Eau Rouge.
Then I knew that I had the car to improve my position, thanks to Claude I did spun twice but I managed to minimized the effect.

I just have a lot of fun racing in this serie and always looking at the next race. Great bunch of guys ! 

Something definitely happened to the service during that race. I know my Q and L bars went up to yellow for a few seconds at the same time someone reported that another driver was blinking, not sure if that is what you are referring to James.

Hopefully you have got ride of the demons James and all will be smooth from here on out.

I wonder if the weather was impacting the Massachusetts server we were using - I was one of the drivers "blinking" early on, and I experienced some pretty significant lag during the early laps.