Nice Pics Al. I'll get them copied over to the post on page 1 shortly.
Here's a replay of the battle between JTV and I over the last 9 laps of the race.
*Before you watch it note that there is a severe punt on the last lap which put me in the sand. This video was produced using my replay. However, JTV has captured the same point in the race and his replay shows no contact and in fact 5-6 feet between cars at that point. So unfortunately this was a case of a lag punt... We have have proof in JTV's replay that he didn't make contact so unfortunately I'm the victim of a connection issue... similar to a DC in a way, but instead of losing everything at least I got a podium finish. Really, both of us were cheated because it was going to be a photo finish and come down to that last chicane... Personally, I had the inside line and I think the odds were in my favor
... but we'll never know... anything could have happened.
Great race JTV and well deserved win! 👍
Basically, we played cat and mouse for almost the entire race. For the first couple laps I pushed to see if I could drop JTV and realized it was a pointless strategy and would only lead to excessive tire wear. So I just settled down to see what he would do and react to that. It was obvious right away he had adopted my EU race strategy where I just stuck behind Tidgney and saved tires without any thought of passing... I wasn't going to push in that scenario and tug JTV around at top speed so I picked a target lap time of 1'41.9 and just shot for that every lap without going under. Parity racing on Wednesday.
Basically that continued for the entire first stint. When it came time to pit I thought about short pitting, but on lap 16 I was in front and knew JTV would probably just follow me... and he's usually a bit better on tires so I decided to just split the race even and see what happened. I then realized his pit box was in front of mine (and so did he obviously)... so we had quite a battle on the last chicane before pitting to see who would go first... if he was behind, he'd likely get held up in the pits and it might be my break away opportunity... well he was more desperate in the chicane and I had to give way and he went into the pits first... I made up my mind there that in the final lap I wasn't going to give in inch.
So the 2nd stint was a repeat of the first... for the most part. But we started thinking about the end game more. A few times I feigned like I was going to push really hard to see how he'd react. He didn't take the hook and basically just saved tires and caught up on the straights. A couple times I fell back just a little to see if he'd push from the front with the same outcome... I was confident in my pace to be honest and that I could close a minor gap even without draft. He wasn't moving. I noticed him doing the same thing to me. Cat and mouse.
Then came the final 5 laps. I said to myself forget this... I'm not going to leave it all to that final chicane where anything can happen and I just started to push as hard as I could. So did JTV... We turned up the aggression and took a pass anytime there was room to do it cleanly... It was all going to come down to the final chicane and there was nothing we could do about it... or it would have had it not been for that pesky lag. 👎
It was definitely the most "unique" race I've been a part of in this series.
Great day/night of racing.
Official NA results:
Combined results for comparison:
) had me sent to the back and battling to get anywhere further up. 
!!
