LMS Round 3 at Motegi

[culchi]

Round 3 at Mugello saw the rolling out of the redesigned Coca Cola Racers Stealth Acura ARX 02a
The new paint jobs for Chucky and Culchi removed the purple effect of the martini logo, and left the new cars with a simpler more dignified paint.
Both drivers were very happy going into qualifying as both Culchi and Chucky were performing consistent near top times. However when we got to race time we were in for a shock.
While our times were still good everyone else seemed to have jumped a second or more a lap quicker.
In qualifying Culchi took 6th spot with a 1.36 just earning his last place in lobby a, while chucky suffered from a clean lap incident and with a 1.37 coming in second in lobby and 8th overal.

Culchi's race was processional to say the best. Running a second a lap slower than his nearest rival and over 3 seconds a lap sometimes to the lead car meant it was just about getting milage up.
A slight mess up by duncan after lapping me the first time was the extent of the excitement up to the middle part of the race until i went to pit, skidded across the grass and hit the pit wall damaging my front aero. this slowed me down even more and i was lamenting that i would be overtaken by lobby b.
However as i happened i finished 6th. B Lobby was taken by lfcnick and then chucky so a 6th and an 8th is and ok finish for the team.
Currently Team is standing in 3rd Place with culchi and Chucky joint 8th in drivers standings.
Roll on Mugello

My race was by far my best LMS race so far, started pole in B lobby with a run on the grass crisis nine toke the place, was holding on for him in the first couple of laps but getting in his slipstream out the corners lost me grip and kept running wide. Then at about lap 3 I ran too wide and got over taken by lfcnicklfc who was chasing down crisis. after a few laps nick was making mistakes and I was starting to catch up to him at about the 40 minute mark I was right behind nick when he dived into the pits, that put me off and ran on the grass, up to 2nd while nick pitted and tried to just set the laps and hopefully overtake in the pits.

about 5 minutes later crisis pits and I take the lead, my petrol light came on and just tried to keep on pushing, at about 50 mins I pitted, hoping for the best that I would get out with the battle between crisis and nick who were running close to each other now, but my effort was not good enough as they both past me in the pits. I thought 'ok this is me settled in 3rd place in the lobby' at about the hour mark I noticed that I was starting to close in on a car, thinking with crisis performance so far that it was going to be nick but I was shocked when it turned out that it was crisis with aero damage due to a tap with nick. I was catching him in the braking zones but losing him as his acceleration was far better then mine.

At about 1hr 5mins I got past crisis on the first corner and held it together and kept the position crisis tried to come in on the inside of the following corner but I gave him very little room to get past and he had to back off. and due to the aero I just managed to pull away from him and finish 2nd in the lobby.

A very good drive by crisis, nick, sam and nightrider in our lobby and with the 1 incident between the LMP2 and the 1 LMP1 car it was very good