Definitely a one-and-done, good grief. My race was fairly enjoyable most of the way through but ended up being infuriating at the end. Thankfully not as bad as it could have been however.
I qualified P6 in the Alfa and went for a 9M/11S. In hindsight I could potentially have made that Soft stint a lap or two longer, the degradation in the race wasn't as bad as I had experienced practicing the combo. The start of the race was a bit sketchy as the Audi starting P4 got all wobbly going through the S-bends in sector 1. Really not what you want to see when everyone's bunched up.
My pace compared to the front pack was slightly lacking and I started falling away, although when it came time to pit I discovered that most of them had started on the Softs. That gave me some hope of pushing back up to them, but as I came out of the pits I found myself behind a (very laggy) Hyundai who wound up fighting with the Audi. I thought I'd just emerged in backmarker traffic and was expecting him to pit since I really wasn't confident about trying to pass someone who's teleporting around a bit. Time rolled on though and he wasn't pitting, so I was just getting more and more bemused with each lap. It turns out he'd started on the Mediums and pit for the Softs several laps earlier, so it was actually a huge undercut.
I did eventually clear him at the beginning of lap 15 after his fight with the Audi ended due to the Audi understeering into the bridge wall and picking up damage, but by then I felt like I'd lost my chance of reeling in the people I had intended to chase. One of the Porsches did fall back pacewise and ended up in a 3-way fight with another Porsche and myself.
Then lap 20 started. This is where the race suddenly switched from being fun to very, very annoying.
I was
not at all happy at losing 2 positions to the Hyundai and Mitsubishi like that. The saving grace was that I didn't pick up damage. I managed to stick close to them, get a good exit off the hairpin and the Alfa's slipstream power let me barely steal P4 back on the line.
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(go go slanted VR results screen!)
P4, 206 points and a clean race bonus despite the last lap nonsense. I honestly reckon I could have taken P3 if not for all of that, but meh.
![Rolleyes :rolleyes: :rolleyes:](/wp-content/themes/gtp16/images/smilies/rolleyes.svg?v=6)
It's still a good result, I'm not risking it.
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VR view replay: