2023/4 GTWS Exhibition Season 1 – Nations’ Cup R3 – Le Mans Circuit de la Sarthe
GT2 League - Mid-B / S Lobby – 114pts to winner
Back to the Nations’ Cup then, and after the last round in the X2019 I was apprehensive of another round in ultra-powerful cars, at least this time they’d be in their natural habitat, and I should be able to rustle up some Gr.1 cars in my garage for some proper Custom Race and Lobby practice runs. Having finally re-entered the world of the living after the illness which turned my Manufacturers’ round 3 experience into half-motor race, half-fever dream I was able to take a Group C car, a Hybrid and a VGT round and make the following conclusions:
- Fuel / tyre strategy. There isn’t one. Even though the only dry tyres allowed are RS, they last the GT2 race distance easily in any of the cars, especially my Hyundai VGT which doesn’t seem to be aware of the concept of tyre wear at all. Fuel is also not a problem for the 8 laps I’ll be doing.
- Car choice is, however, massive. Group C cars will fly down the straights, reaching 220+mph on the Hunaudieres just before the first chicane. LMPs and Hybrids struggle to reach 200mph unless you drop all the downforce, but are epic round the corners and on acceleration. VGTs seem somewhere between the two, and could be an all-round safe choice, especially if it’s wet where they excel.
- The weather. If it’s wet then the Hyundai VGT is all you need. (This was later proven when I entered a lobby in torrential rain – a lobby that included A+ drivers in Group C cars – and took fastest lap by thirteen seconds). If it’s a mixture, then you will have to look at how long each weather condition will last and make your car choice based on how comfortable you feel struggling with a Group C in the wet or a VGT in the dry.
- Given the significant differences in the feel of the cars, the lap times at first were surprisingly similar. As I got used to the cars and track, however, in the dry the Group Cs won out. I did most of my Group C practice in a Mazda, with occasional stints in a Porsche or a Jag. I didn’t own the Nissan so could only try it in Free Practise mode, but it did vie with the Mazda for quickest time (3:21).
Lobby races were excellent, with good driving and sportsmanship in almost every case. The one exception was a guy in a Sauber who seemed to have gone for a high-downforce setup given how I could pass him down the straights in an untuned Mazda but he’d then absolutely send it through the corners (I swear he was taking the Ford Chicanes in 4th!) and if I was in the way then that’s my bad luck isn’t it. After being punted out of the way 4 times in an 8-lap practice race I took note of the name, and even though we were both B/S I felt confident we’d avoid each other come race day – hopefully.
So, come Friday evening, my mind was set. I noted that every round I’ve done this season has some kind of curveball that means it isn’t just “here’s a car, go fast”. In Nations’ Round 1 it was the super strong slipstream and odd tunes of the cars. In Nations’ R2 it was the need to use 3 compounds of tyres. In Manufacturers’ Round 3 it was the weather. I knew that there were a lot of tuning options allowed here, although I’d preferred to spend my time perfecting my lines rather than tuning, wagering that a good line would make more difference than a better setup. I did, however, take note of the work that others were doing – and publishing – on here. More than anything, however, my choice of car would be based on the weather – so, just as last week in the Eifel Mountains, I would be back on here early Saturday to get the track condition news filtering through from the A-O region. I was 70% sure there would be rain, and if there was I was sure it would either start dry then rain on lap 4 or thereabouts, or start wet but stop raining around lap 3, with a dry line then slowly starting to appear.
Saturday Morning, and a now familiar routine:
- Get up
- Walk dogs
- Make breakfast for everyone (inc dogs)
- Shovel cornflakes while logging on here to find out conditions
…. Aaand it’s dry. Just dry. No wet track at all. So, tuning must be considered the “curveball” that could make the difference. Didn’t I see a video posted on this thread about that? (searches) ah yes, here it is. Right I’ll give those a try when I get home at 9, I’ll sack off the chance of the 1st slot and have an hours testing of that Nissan with @Mistah_MCA tunes instead.
That hour was invaluable. First conclusion is that I am the tuning equivalent of the 3 bears.
- High downforce: Too slow
- Low downforce: Too fast! (down the straights anyway, most of the corner time was spent finding new and interesting gravel traps)
- Medium downforce: Just right…
…and it was with that setup that I reduced my best time to a high 3:19 but, more importantly I took over 2 seconds off a “typical” lap time. Sold – I’ll take it, wrap it up.
To the race lobby we go. Didn’t bother with free practice – grab the loan car, apply the setup, spend the last couple of minutes checking and re-checking the setup to make sure it is exactly as per the video and that it has saved properly. I felt like a student who has finished their exam paper early and can only go through checking and re-checking their answers.
Finally qualifying opened – and I might as well copy & paste my qualifying rant from the Nurburgring here, with some figures and names changed to reflect the different track, but everything else is the same…
6 minute qualifying session. If we budget a generous 4 minutes to get round that means that we can spend 2 minutes in the pits before heading out – so why does everyone bar 3 people head to the pit exit as soon as the session opens? You’re not going to get 2 flying laps in unless you’ve managed to invent time travel so get yourself some space – on a speed-dependant narrow long circuit this is, surely, absolutely essential. I wait for the other 2 to go off and start my lap when they are leaving the 1st chicane on the Hunaudieres straight.
Quite frankly if someone can enlighten me to the desire to rush for the pit exit like it’s the first day of the January Sales when you’re never going to be able to squeeze an extra lap in by doing so – surely even the most extra-terrestrial of aliens can’t do an out lap and a flying lap round here in 6 minutes – then I’ll nominate you for a Nobel Prize or something. In fact I’m so much later out of the traps than the rest that lap times start coming through when I am between the 2 Hunaudieres chicanes. 3:24, 3:25, 3:22…. I expected them to be quicker than that, this is potentially good news… One driver did a 3:19, another a quick 3:20 and then me with a low 3:21. All in loaner Nissans, then a Mazda behind me and aaaargh… It’s my “friend” from the lobbies in his Sauber in 5th on the grid. Damn. Well, benefit of the doubt and all that – perhaps he was just testing his setup and needed to maximise corner speed to get some data, and wouldn’t be like that in the race.
The race starts, and I’m suddenly reminded of something I found out in the lobbies – the Mazda is quicker from the start than the Nissan. P4 outdrags me past the pits – OK, leave them the space on the sweeper, brake just nicely for the 1st chicane, wait for the bang from behind by the Sauber – it doesn’t happen, good man – and tag on to the back of the 787B through the Esses, knowing that, now I can do 230mph down the straights I should be able to get the place back. The Mazda driver knows it too, and has seemingly decided to take Tertre Rouge flat out and nuts to the track limits, they’ll try and gain enough that they can ride out the track limits penalty and still hold on to the position. As a result of this I am still behind at the 1st chicane, but outdrag them to the next chicane, they don’t make it easy – totally valid, this is a motor race – but I’m through and gain enough on the 3rd section of the back stretch that I can take my line through Mulsanne corner, sweep round and onto the next straight, although I’m still cursing the French Highways Agency for turning the original crossroads at Mulsanne into a roundabout (which is why we have that kink under braking for the Mulsanne corner as it is these days, the original approach was straight ahead with the corner being further over to the left).
On to Indianapolis and Arnage – I’m concentrating on my braking so as not to get sideways, which means I fail to notice on the radar that the Mazda has sent it through the Indianapoils approach and is now right on my tail approaching Arnage. I brake and feel a shove, not a punt just a shove, I think I braked earlier than they anticipated, still they’re through and I’m back in P4… until they serve their 1.5 second penalty from hammering Tertre Rouge earlier and I can have the top-3 back thanks very much. By this time P1 is 6 seconds up the road – what are you even doing in a B-lobby? - with P2 3 seconds ahead of me. I pull away from the field on lap 2 – in a sprint race like this the only “strat” is to try to get a gap from the field and run away like a Monty Python knight:
Lap 3 and P2 is still out of reach but I get a rhythm going and chip away at the gap. As we approach Indianapolis I am just over a second behind, but they slightly miss their braking point into the banked curve and go wide. Only a couple of car widths off the apex but I’m now right on them into Arnage. Attack? No, go as normal, concentrate on a good exit speed – hopefully my presence will pressure them into going defensive and they’ll be slow out of the corner as a result. I love it when a plan comes together, and that’s exactly what happens – I draw alongside on the right going into the first of the Porsche curves, they have to slow as I’m where they want to be and I sweep through into P2. I’ve got 0.6 seconds as we leave the sweepers, but they stick with me – it’s still 0.6 seconds as we leave Tertre Rouge on the next lap. I can’t see them on the radar as I approach my braking point so slow as normal, but as I hit the second apex on the chicane I see the picture of their car appear on the right of my screen, and as I exit the chicane the gap behind is now 3.6 seconds to the Mazda from earlier and the other Nissan is now p6. Looking at the replay I now see that they missed their braking point, at which time they had 3 choices – hope to send it through a gap that may not be there, take me out or go up the escape road. To their eternal credit they took the last of these options – their extra speed up the escape road as I took the chicane meant they overtook me then I took the place back, which is how I saw the pic of their car on my screen.
The rest of the race was quite quiet by comparison – I stayed p2, the gap to the leader went up to 10 seconds at one point but finished at 8 – they probably decided to manage the gap and not take risks in the last few laps – and the gap behind to the Mazda shrink for a while then suddenly expanded after Arnage – I think they copped another penalty – and ended at 8 seconds also. The Nissan that I had a battle with and then went off worked their way back up to P4 I think.
This was an all-Group C affair apart from one Porsche hybrid and a Peugeot diesel. Nissans dominated the entry list, with Mazdas the next most popular and single entries for Sauber and Jaguar. I was glad it was dry in a way, even though I think my Hyundai would have cleaned up in a fully wet race – I love driving the old-school Group C cars. In his book “Working The Wheel”, Martin Brundle describes driving a Group C car up the Hunaudieres straight as “a lazy old friend carrying you along on a wave of torque” and certainly the Jag and Nissan felt that way – the rotary Mazda is a little too frenetic for that – even their 5-speed ‘boxes with slow changes are much more satisfying than the BAMBAMBAM….BAM………..BAM of going up through the gears in a Hybrid. I even achieved my goal of doing 8 laps without a single penalty (10 if we include qualifying) – earlier in the week I’d been seeing more red than a teachers’ pen factory – and got the CRB for my lack-of trouble. And I equalled my door ranking of #2 (the winner was #13!), so that was satisfying too. 108 points in the bag – another GTWS PB.
So on to the next round. I can’t do Manufacturers’ R4 as I have to go to a family celebration (what are these people doing, having significant life events when there is a GTWS on? Can’t they set priorities or something?) so let’s look at Nations’ R4. So far we’ve had a slipstreamers’ special on a track with long straights, a race for super-quick cars and a race for more super-quick cars at a slipstreamers’ track with long straights, so I’m sure they’ll mix it up for R4. Let me just look at the events list:
Really? In all seriousness, it’s as valid a motor race as anything else we’ve had so no complaints, but now that I’ve got 3 half-decent scores I’ll be less inclined to go into a race which could end well or end with a Talladega-with-restrictor-plates-style Big One and suffer a DR and SR hit into the bargain. I do, sadly, know of what I speak – I entered the similar race twice when it was Daily Race A a couple of weeks ago – First race I went from last on the grid to win, second race I was in the barrier before we’d even got to the crest on the first straight. In addition I believe it’ll be like Nations’ R1 in that the cars for selection aren’t like their garage equivalents so it’ll be hard to get any lobby or Custom Race practice. Never say never, but I can see myself sitting the next one out. Watch this space (the one between my ears).
Thanks must go to
@Mistah_MCA for the very helpful tune video and to all the clean drivers in my race, and of course to anyone that’s read this far!
Although there wasn't much grip I felt comfortable and came into a flow with about 80% pace and 20% error margin. I got P2 after an error by the polesetter.
