Had a more interesting final race than I was expecting, managed to find my groove just in time for qualy and managed a 3:20.799 for my seventh (eighth?) straight pole on the first flying lap, so I decided to park it and save the engine mileage for the race. Good start off the line, cleanly through the Dunlop Chicane and my car decides to shut off all drive-by-wire controls in order to visit the Allan McNish crash site for
s and giggles. A little bit of deja vu as I rejoined at Tertre Rouge down in 11th and last position, but could at least look forward to having some battles as I now aimed to close down the 15s gap to the front.
Passed a stricken
@grassies who suffered a similar electrical gremlin at the first Mulsanne chicane and made up another 2 positions by the end of the first lap. Made up a further 3 positions over the following 2 laps with clean drives past
@BMWF30328 on the narrow back straight and braking down the inside of
@its-benny-racer into Mulsanne corner. Once again
@Adronaught was a team player and waved me through into 4th position at the start of lap 4 and I was back into the podium positions at the end of the lap with the lead gap reduced to 8s.
It took another 2 laps before I gained the upper hand on
@holdenman05 , sharing a half-spin out of Arnage with him in the process. It was another 7 laps before I caught up to
@Hatfield in the back half of lap 14, as we'd pitted out of sequence in between laps 9 and 10. Inevitably I lost some ground trying to follow him through the high downforce Porsche curves, but closed back in through the final chicanes and launched my first attack at the following Dunlop curves as I tested his mettle. I'd only managed to put him out of position for the corner but could now prepare for the drag race to come.
I caught the slipstream down the first section of Mulsanne straight, pulled along side but Hat managed to brake later and hung on to the lead. It was short-lived though as I was now much closer behind out of the chicane and sailed past him down the second straight. In
a move that Team Peugeot Total would've been proud of, Hat tried another out-braking manoeuvre into the second chicane but only managed to turn into my side and luckily came off worse
. By the end of the lap, a 3.5s gap had safely put my slipstream out of reach and I built it up to 13s for our final pit stops just 3 laps later. For the final stint I just tried to beat my early FL but couldn't go below 3:21 as the engine oil degraded so couldn't make much of a difference in the end.
12th -
@cola1001 - DSC, no lap time set.
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