LeMONS to LeMANS Wednesday Series

[dabneyd]

Here's the last bit of the race that I captured live last night.

 

[diabolicwyvern]

@Chuyler--Thank you for hosting another great L2L season. I widh there was another race or two as my car was far enough now above the rest to keep on taking top two finishes. Its too bad the race I sacked was as bad a finish as it was. Had I took 7th or 8th and not 11th, this could have been more compelling.

 

[chuyler1]

Tons of fun. Thanks for the video Dabney. To put things in perspective, Sl3ight had the fastest car of the bunch. WiiFreak and I were pretty even but I had a tad more straight line speed while he was better in the corners. A quick review of how it went down...

Laps 1-8: The three of us raced nose to tail the entire time. Occasionally I would slingshot past sl3ight on the first mulsanne straight but i could only hold the lead for at best the 2nd chicane before he caught up.

Lap 9: At the final right hander of the Porsche curves, Sl3ight lost grip and went off the track. Wiifreak and I got by without any trouble. I knew Sl3ight was going to pit so I jumped into the pits while Wiifreak stayed out. I figured if Sl3ight lost enough time he wouldn't catch up, and this was my only opportunity to ditch Wiifreak and find out if I could run faster laps.

Lap 10: Wiifreak goes in for his pit stop and I pass by with a solid lead. So far so good. I maintained a decent gap for several laps.

Laps 13-17: Sl3ight gains about 5 seconds per lap and closes the gap on me. In the process he passes WiiFreak who tags along in his draft. Doh! There goes my strategy.

Lap 18: Sl3ight is in the lead and touches the dirt exiting Indianapolis. I get by on the outside and hit Arnage clean enough to build a small gap. Sl3ight pushes hard in my draft and attempts an outside pass on the first right hander of the Porsche curves. He runs wide and slides into the dirt.

Lap 19: WiiFreak and I do our best to stay ahead. I admittedly push my tires a little too hard to keep Sl3ight away. It isn't working. He's gaining too much time on the straights and my tires are starting to go.

Lap 20: Sl3ight catches us just before Indianapolis. I move inside (my one move) and block his slingshot. I maintain the lead through Indi but my tires were toast. I run a little wide through Arnage and that was enough for both of them to slip past me (the start of the video above -- and a great move by both of them). The problem here was that they were both inside and I was stuck outside. I got a little bit of Sl3ight's draft and stayed beside WiiFreak but there was no way I was going to make it 2-wide through the first porsche right-hander...and I'm not the kind of driver to push someone out of the way. So I eased off the throttle and ducked behind WiiFreak. You can see in the video I really didn't have much front tire and I went wide exiting the porsche curves and that was the end of my race.

I should have placed ahead of WiiFreak but I just didn't have the tires to battle on the last lap. It really looked like we were going to hold off Sl3ight so I used my tires too soon. Oh well, live and learn. It was real fun trying to run fast laps that entire time. I didn't know how much faster Sl3ight was so each time he went off track I tried my best to make the most of the opportunity. Otherwise we would have just run single-file the entire race and that's no fun.

 

[sl3ight]

What a race! One of the best of the season for me in terms of excitement as well as where I finished. I think the last five laps were the hardest I've ever driven. I nearly lost it like three times trying to catch up to WiiFreak and Huyler. All it took for me to get through was Chuyler going a little wide at Arnage, otherwise I think Wiifreak may have passed us both since I was seriously wanting for grip through the Porsche Curves.

I shouldn't really have been in that position anyway though. Two stupid mistakes meant I needed to take risks to catch back up. Glad it worked out though.

I'll repeat Diabolics thanks to Huyler, and also thank Garris for taking care of the Tuesday series. Can't wait for next season.

 

[chuyler1]

I'm glad I had drivers to battle with almost every race. That's what my goal was with the points system and it worked out much better than last season where grenade and I pretty much dominated the whole season until the last race.

However, it is quite obvious that the MG dominated on both nights, or more importantly lightweight MR cars dominated (if you want to include my Toyota MR2). I made only two position changing mistakes the entire season. At Trial Mtn I got caught in lap traffic and lost 4 points crashing into dabney I think. I should have placed ahead of Wiifreak. Then here at le Sarthe I should have placed ahead of him again. Adding those points to my score and subtracting positions from Wiifreak would have resulted in the following...

Diabolic: 97
WiiFreak: 96
chuyler: 94

So my accidents didn't affect the outcome of my placement...but they did prevent Diabolic from winning the championship using his "sandbag" technique. I picked a car I knew was slow to start and didn't have a turbo option...and I managed to drive it to 3rd place. Not bad.

Final Official Results
https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/h...9OdDhlZ0JsQXBiVFZ0SHRmWmxfZkp3LUE&output=html

By the way, I mucked with the points and removed drivers that missed 2 or more races and adjusted points as if they weren't there. The results of the season end up the same but with WiiFreak having an even greater gap. I'd love to see what would have happened if all 16 drivers attended every race but its too hard to predict that sort of outcome.

 

[diabolicwyvern]

I still like my strategy and it would have worked if I'd installed the mid turbo and not the high RPM. After the Monza sand bagging where I just had fun w/ Lumberjack, I took 2nd,1st,2nd,1st. The HIGH RPM turbo killed me at Monaco. I had too much lag out of the corners and Wii low turbo just kept pulling away. I gave him a good run though. Had I won and he he'd taken 2nd place, well...what could have been. I still think my strategy took me ahead of my ability. Had I raced every race to my best ability, I think I would have had a hard enough time taking 3rd place let alone 2nd.

 

[grenadeshark]

I'm glad I had drivers to battle with almost every race. That's what my goal was with the points system and it worked out much better than last season where grenade and I pretty much dominated the whole season until the last race.

However, it is quite obvious that the MG dominated on both nights, or more importantly lightweight MR cars dominated (if you want to include my Toyota MR2). I made only two position changing mistakes the entire season. At Trial Mtn I got caught in lap traffic and lost 4 points crashing into dabney I think. I should have placed ahead of Wiifreak. Then here at le Sarthe I should have placed ahead of him again. Adding those points to my score and subtracting positions from Wiifreak would have resulted in the following...

Diabolic: 97
WiiFreak: 96
chuyler: 94

So my accidents didn't affect the outcome of my placement...but they did prevent Diabolic from winning the championship using his "sandbag" technique. I picked a car I knew was slow to start and didn't have a turbo option...and I managed to drive it to 3rd place. Not bad.

Final Official Results
https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/h...9OdDhlZ0JsQXBiVFZ0SHRmWmxfZkp3LUE&output=html

By the way, I mucked with the points and removed drivers that missed 2 or more races and adjusted points as if they weren't there. The results of the season end up the same but with WiiFreak having an even greater gap. I'd love to see what would have happened if all 16 drivers attended every race but its too hard to predict that sort of outcome.

I would have 100% won 2 races and I probably would have caught up to beaten twitchy in the cote de azur race(had my power not gone out). Might have made the top standing interesting. My job is so weird though. Hard to show up to them all: (