GTP 7th F1 World Championship - Round 3 - Malaysia
Weather - Dry
Qualifying Results:
Pole -
Shaggy Alonso (Tyrrell) -
1:32.588
2nd. - Baumi27 (Brawn) - 1:32.592
3rd. -
DarkPSI (Benetton) -
1:33.5xx
4th. - Pipeslice (Jordan)- 1:34.058
5th. -
Mutu20 (Tyrrell)-
1:34.118
6th. - Tombrooks97 (Jordan)- 1:34.894
7th. -
Upuaut (Brabham)-
1:36.491
8th. - kcheeb (Hesketh)- 1:37.195
9th. -
AliT12 (Brabham)-
1:37.994
10th. - Manios22DC (Brawn)
Race Results:
1st.
Shaggy Alonso (Tyrrell) - 45:18.946
2nd.
Pipeslice (Jordan) + 9.0 secs
3rd.
DarkPSI (Benetton) + 39.4 secs
4th.
Baumi27 (Brawn) + 49.6 secs
5th.
Mutu20 (Tyrrell) + 55.7 secs
6th.
Upuaut (Brabham) + 1 lap
7th.
AliT12 (Brabham) + 1 lap
8th.
kcheeb (Hesketh) +1 lap
9th.
Tombrooks97 (Jordan) +2 laps
DNF.
Manios22DC (Brawn) DNF
Race Footage
courtesy of DarkPSI:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4 (skip to 2:00 for Dark's great battle with Baumi27):
Part 5:
Qualifying:
I'm sure we were all glad for the dry weather in qualifying. I put my first banker lap in of a 1:32.6 which when I came back to the pits I saw was about 1.4 secs clear of anyone else which led me to believe falsely that it would be enough for pole. While on my second out-lap,
Baumi27 banged in a stunner - 1.32.5 - to trump me for provisional pole. I pushed a bit harder on my following lap and beat his by the absolute skin of my teeth, just 4 thousandths of a second in it! As it turned out, neither of us improved on these laps on our final runs and so the front row was set.
Midway through the session,
DarkPSI's PS3 crashed and he never got the chance to improve on his lap time when he surely would have been in with a shout of the front row. More significantly however, this meant we had to restart the race so that he could rejoin, but with the grid order set to random. The main beneficiary of this was
Tombrooks97 who started from pole - however it should be noted that Tom came within 2.3 seconds of pole, that's about 4 seconds closer to the pace than he was back at Bahrain meaning he must surely have the most improved pace of anyone 👍
Race:
With the jumbled up grid order, I started from 4th, an uncomfortable midfield slot with DarkPSI way back in 10th (an advantageous position IMHO). Opting to start on the softs this week, I got off to a blistering start, quickly disposing of two cars and then went into turn one side by side with Tom, with me holding the inside line. I deliberately went wide for turn two to give Tom space but in the end it made no difference as he missed the turn altogether and pushed us both completely off the race track - a crazy move. I was extra careful coming back onto the track at turn 3 trying not to wipe out any of the cars whizzing past. This put me down to 8th I believe.
The next part of the race was rather a blur as I went into battle with seemingly everyone, and it was unclear who was on the options, who was on the primes, who was fast, who was not and generally where I was in the race. I remember on the first couple of laps being extremely close behind
Baumi27, who was close behind I think
Upuaut. I braked early into the corners to avoid contact, but when I got much better purchase off turn 9, I tagged Baumi unfortunately and had to wait for him to re-pass which I did rather clumsily in hindsight by stopping immediately. What I should have done was drive on until the backstraight and then let him by there. I think this is worth noting for everyone for future reference.
Within a few laps i'd worked my way up to third, behind the leader
DarkPSI and
Pipeslice in 2nd. Dark was 11 seconds down the road and I set about closing this gap down. I was only able to peg him back by roughly 3-4 tenths a lap on average which worried me as I didn't know if he was on the soft or hard rubber. If he was on the hard, i'd have known then that it was impossible to catch him but much to my relief he pitted on lap 10, but lost about 5 seconds just prior to his pitstop, obviously getting involved in some sort of incident. Just before the pitstop window I'd been chasing down Pipeslice who wasn't a pushover. I felt the easiest way to get past was to attempt to leapfrog him in the pits so I stayed out until lap 12 but much to my amazement, i'd leapfrogged both him and DarkPSI, easily - again both probably ran into trouble with backmarkers
They had both swapped positions, and as I drove on I noticed Dark tumbling down the field, as low as 6th at one point I think. I knew something was amiss here because he's probably the most consistent driver out of the lot of us. I was soon to have my own taste of backmarker trouble. I came up behind
Tombrooks97 and
kcheeb who were going at it hammer and tongs with each other. Tom was the driver behind and seemed oblivious to my being directly behind him, weaving wildly to somehow try and grab his attention! During this spell behind them, I lost about 5 seconds and had to defend desperately against Pipeslice while at the same time
trying to attack both Tom and kcheeb without crashing into them, who both should have let me through - this was a highly stressful part of the race for me! 👎
Eventually I got past Tom when he went wide at turn 11 and then the following lap I got past kcheeb. I also remember lapping
Upuaut, who took a while to recognise I was there but his driving at least wasn't erratic and he let me go at turn one when he realised I was coming through.
AliT12 was the only driver who let me through appropriately and in complete accordance with the
OLR.
After fending off the backmarkers
and Pipeslice who was the only guy I should have been
racing at that point, I pulled out about a 15 second lead. DarkPSI worked his way back through the field and displaced Baumi for 3rd but because of various incidents with backmarkers he found himself well behind 2nd placed pipeslice. I enjoyed my last few laps, getting into the groove finally and setting consistent 1:33's, until it was interrupted by yet another heart in mouth moment whereby, I, in the lead, get taken out with just a couple of laps left by Tom who i'm lapping! Déjà vu
We went into turn 9 side by side and he spun me 180 on the exit, I had to do two donuts to get facing in the right direction again and genuinely thought I was going to lose the lead. In the end, no harm done as there was only one lap left and my lead was intact, just
We discussed at length the situation after the race and Dark and I were by no means the only drivers affected by this sort of carelessness. Seeing as we have discussed it, I don't see the need to go into it any more other than to quote directly what it says in the OLR about it:
Drivers that are about to get lapped have to make sure not to interfere with the lapping cars. Slow down on the straights on either side of the track or maintain the outside line during cornering. If for whatever reason you happen to be on the inside line when being overtaken, stay on the inside line until all drivers that were about to lap you have passed. You are not allowed to deliberately block the lapping cars.
Still a fun race as always and I got the impression everyone enjoyed it despite the problems, but I really hope it's a lesson to us all and that we won't have anywhere near the same level of problems in the future. Thanks to everyone who took part, mattymc96 should be joining us next week as well 👍
Here's the tables
Drivers Championship
1st.
Shaggy Alonso - 95 pts
2nd.
DarkPSI - 77 pts
3rd.
Baumi27 - 62 pts
4th.
NumbPhase - 34 pts
5th.
Mutu20 - 26 pts
6th
Upuaut - 26 pts
7th.
Pipeslice - 23 pts
8th.
DOUQA - 19 pts
9th
tombrooks97 - 16 pts
10th.
Jerry786 - 12 pts
11th
AliT12 - 6 pts
12th.
kcheeb - 5 pts
13th.
Shark33 - 3 pts
14th.
Manios22DC - 2 pts
Teams Championship
1st.
Tyrrell - 121 pts (Shaggy Alonso, Mutu20)
2nd.
Benetton - 77 pts (DarkPSI, DonkeyFuzz)
3rd.
Brawn - 64 pts (Baumi, Manios22DC)
4th.
Hesketh- 58 pts (kcheeb, Mattymc96, NumbPhase, DOUQA)
5th.
Jordan - 51 pts (Tombrooks97, Pipeslice, Jerry786, Shark33)
6th.
Brabham - 32 pts (Upuaut, AliT12)
