Had a great race a Monaco last night. Been really busy lately, so hadn't played the game in a while. Due to that, I was only up to Monaco in my career with Renault.
Thinking that Monaco is probably the worst track to come back to after a break, I thought I'd blow the rust off by using up plenty of the practice time. I spent about half of the practice time just running around the track getting myself back up to speed.
I went into quali not expecting much, just basically hoping to beat my team mate. I wasn't looking forward to what I expected to be a weak performance, and the team obviously shared my enthusiasm, as they told me it'd be hard to get out of q1.
My first lap in q1 was very average, and I wasn't at all happy with it. I had enough fuel for a few laps though, so I ran three laps more, and was slower on each subsequent one. Figuring I'd taken the best life out of the ultra softs, I pitted to take on another set (I had plenty because I went aggressive on tyre choice). I looked at the times, and was surprised to see I was only .04 of a second behind Magnussen. We were both looking to be eliminated from q1 though, and I knew if I hooked it up there was plenty left on the table, so I went back out on new ultras. I managed to hook up a good lap, and took 1.3 seconds off my time, which landed me firmly into q2, which I was more than happy with.
There were some strange results in q1 which surprised me, watching the timing screens. Vettel must have either crashed, or had a car issue, because he had set just one lap, and it was very slow compared to Raikkonen, which actually led to Vettel being eliminated in q1. The other oddities were Haryanto and Wehrlein both easily got through to q2, although Manor had brought a number of updates to Monaco which put their development level with us and Force India, so it wasn't entirely odd.
Q2 came along, and I was already happy with just being there, but was hoping to go faster than at least the Manors, and was wondering if anyone would try using the super softs, as a number of drivers had in q1. I put together a very fast lap straight up, and then went to the pits to watch the timing screens. I was surprised to see not a lot of cars beating my time, and by the end of the session I was 8th and through to q3!
In q3, I was wondering if the Mercs would find some performance, as they had been struggling a little in q1 and q2, being close to Raikkonen, but behind both Red Bull and Toro Rosso. Kvyat couldn't manage a decent lap, and ended up behind both Mercs and Raikkonen, who himself had split the Mercs. However, I was ahead of them all in fourth, Sainz was ahead of me, and Red Bull took a front row lockout, with Verstappen on pole.
The race started very cleanly, and I managed to get ahead of Sainz before the end of lap one. The two Red Bulls pulled away initially, but after several laps I started to reel them back in. Just when I started to think they had tyre wear issues, and my car was better on the tyres, I checked my own wear to find my rear tyres were wearing much faster than the fronts. Given the Renault's bad tendency to understeer, and my preference for oversteer, I was getting faster because of the tyre grip balance changing to oversteer over the course of the stint. I used this to my advantage, and managed to dispatch of both Ricciardo and Verstappen before my pit stop on lap 15 (50% race). The rears were pretty bad by lap 15, particularly the right rear, so I pitted as soon as my pit window opened, instead of extending the stint as I was planning to.
My second stint was meant to be the last, but I knew my tyre wear would be on the limit, so I faced a choice: Either go flat out and make a late stop for ultra soft (still had a new set left, again thanks to my aggressive tyre choice), or control the pace and make the tyres last. I had a 9 second gap to Verstappen, so I decided to take it easy initially, but after a few laps I saw that Verstappen had very good pace, so I upped my pace to control the gap at around 10 seconds. Unfortunately, my tyres were wearing at a rate I couldn't sustain without pitting again, so I decided to go all out and make another stop. Verstappen's pace was very close to my own, even when I was pushing, so I only managed to build the gap to 12 seconds before I decided to pit again with 8 laps to go.
Verstappen took the lead, but I still managed to slot into second ahead of Alonso, who had taken a lot of places due to a fortunately timed VSC right as he needed to pit, which slowed down many cars which had already pitted from ahead of him. Over the next few laps, I took big chunks of time out of Verstappen, setting fastest lap after fastest lap, and when I caught him I was quickly past, his worn super softs giving him no chance of defending against me on much fresher ultra softs. His pace then dropped off dramatically, so I'm guessing he needed to conserve tyres and/or fuel heavily to make it to the end on his one stop strategy, so by the end of the race, I had managed to build up the 12 second gap I had over him before I had made my second stop.
In the end, I was pretty stoked with the result, and the battles I had during the race were really good, with the AI cars not yielding so easily like they used to pre-patch, but still racing cleanly. Still, the Renault is still far behind most teams in development (currently fifth from the bottom), so I'm not expecting the performance of the car to allow me to fight for wins like this at many other circuits.
So I stopped twice and lost 5 positions overall.
