I'm not sure about setups on this series. The default seems ok to me (except at test course obviously). All I did was tune my 1.5 Vitz car to 272 hp, fitted soft tyres (kept a spare set of hards for test course), and went for an aggressive strategy. I left the gearing as road gearing. Driving this car is about maintaining speed - maximising your minimum speed through a corner, so you can drive it perfectly well with long ratios, just drive a bit wider round the corners.
My main worry was the I had never driven an FF car in GT3 before outside of golding the license tests, and there weren't very many there. But then I thought, they wouldn't make all these road cars FF for everyday people to drive if it weren't easy in some way!
At the first 2 races I pitted twice, on lap 4 and lap 7. At the first race, Rome, I emerged in the lead after my second stop, and won by 12 seconds. At the second race, I emerged in third after my second stop, and won by 9 seconds.
At Test Course I had a little problem because I couldn't change the gearing and my car wouldn't go past 210, instead dropping right off to 202. I thought 'what the hell' and went for it anyway, from the back of the grid. I dropped over 3 seconds behind the field on the first lap and was thinking about giving up. But with a little effort and blending of the throttle, I could keep the Yaris going at 208/209/210 kph by keeping my finger gently pressing the throttle almost fully on the DS2. I gradually came back, and caught the field by the beginning of lap 4. I think they were also running the same gearing as me, so it took a long time to pick my way through the field. But by the start of lap 7 I hit the front, and stayed there, never leading by much more than 1 second. I won by 0.994 seconds.
At SS11 I had a problem because I could not even remember driving this track in this direction - I'm not sure I had ever done it before. So I drove a few qualifying laps on hards to familiarise myself with the corners. Then I switched to softs and set a 2:08 pole by 5 seconds! I thought man, this race is gonna be easy (it wasn't). It was going to be a very long race so I went for 3 stops, one on lap 3, lap 6 and lap 8. I had a lot of tyre wear before my first and second pitstops, and on lap 3 and lap 6 I had so much understeer I was using the handbrake to turn the slow corners.
But I emerged from my second stop not too far behind the field. I was able to catch, pass them, then pit on lap 8, then came out 8 or so seconds behind I caught the field, and starting lap 10, I was 5th. But the computers were fading badly, I set a 2:07.0 and won by 9.4 seconds (I kid you not, I was 10 seconds faster than the field on the final lap).
Grand Valley, I did the same again. Didn't bother with quali because I know the course. Won pretty easily (the comps don't like this track), using the same 3 stop strategy as for SS11, because the race is *long*. This one was pretty boring, unlike the previous 2 which were quite tense! I won by 43 seconds. I honestly don't think my strategy was the best for this track, due to the extreme length of the pitlane. But I was really getting used to driving the Vitz, and let's face it - the computers are weak.
