I suppose I might as well join the people who've looked back at their Manufacturer season. In terms of DR and average points per contributing race, this is by far my best to date. No S rank, but it seems like the competitiveness for that across all manufacturers has skyrocketed over the last couple of seasons and Mazda is much more popular than Mitsubishi! With that in mind, coming 24th for Mazda in EMEA? Very happy with that.
I've been kicking myself the whole season though, due to this:
I'm going full-on Mazda Atenza for this short season, primarily from testing random Gr.3 cars from manufacturers I haven't played before to find one I can sort of handle in the wet. It's probably not going to serve me well for a grid start, but meh. I guess I'll also find out how bad the Gr.4 Atenza is. (I believe Famine dubbed it a "rotting dog wang" a few pages back?
)
Never go full Atenza. At least not right now. I had
no idea the VGT was considered so strong when the season began, completely missed the memo on that one. I think I tried using it previously for a Nations race at Catalunya and found it a bit too tail-happy for my liking with the way I drive, so I immediately discounted it after just a few laps. When I locked in and then discovered it was considered one of the most OP Group 3 cars following the BOP changes... oh dear. I guess I did Mazda hard mode.
The win at Bathurst was completely unexpected, especially with that being the second highest scoring lobby I'd ever been in at the time. When free practice first rolled around for that after Spa it took me about 20-30 minutes to do a lap without binning it at the top of the mountain or screwing up the downhill, no lie. I also can't help but feel like I've put myself right in the crossfire of the lasting debate of whether the Nissan or Mazda Gr.4 is worse that
@Famine and
@stpatty have been having by pulling that off with stpatty
in the race.
The win was also a welcome pick-up for both me and my dad, as my mum passed away back in late February. Coming away from a race feeling that exhilarated did wonders for my mood as I had not long returned to work from bereavement leave and had been struggling. My Glasgow Rangers liveries this season were dedicated to my dad who has some interest in motorsports; primarily F1 but he also enjoyed watching the GT Sport world finals when I introduced him to that a couple of years ago. He likes watching my races from time to time, so seeing one on top of the podium with the victory screen was a happy distraction for him too.
I'm definitely taking a break from the 4WD Group 4s for a while now and considering Chevrolet for the main 2021 season as I haven't done that one before and it's back into my normal comfort zone of FR power cars. The stability 4WDs have is nice but they just feel so stiff when trying to get the car to rotate, especially once the tyres start to go.
Now I just have to see how I fare now that my DR is in the upper half of A for the first time after Tokyo Expressway. I still remember going crazy when I managed to score 100 points from an FIA race for the first time, and now here I am in the DR range where lobbies could potentially offer double that.