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| After three abysmally poor laps, I finally got it all together on the fourth lap. |
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A yellow flag is being waved at the start/finish line tp warn us that someone has spun just past this corner. | ||||
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It's a Toyota, another rear-drive vehicle from the Rubber class.
He's stopped well off to the side. He shouldn't pose any threat to me from there, unless he suddenly decides to drive out in front of me. You never know for sure, so I watch him carefully until I'm clear. |
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Safely past the spinner I flick my car into the left hander leading onto the front straight, upshift to third, and smoothly accelerate onto the straight in a nicely controlled third gear drift with a minimum of wheelspin. All the way down the straight you can hear the engine revs hunting up and down as the rear wheels scrabble for grip on the slick ice. |
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The turn-in to the hairpin could have been cleaner. I make a small bobble trying to drag the car up against the inside snowbank where a narrow strip of better traction can still be found. | ||||
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On the back side of the track, turning into the new right/left kink,
I've finally discovered that it's smarter to enter this first turn
slowly in order to hook the inside on the exit, thereby setting up a much
straighter run through the left turn onto the short back straight.
Oh ya. That feels MUCH better. While busy congratulating myself for discovering this improved line through the new kink, I completely miss the upshift from 2nd to 3rd gear. Doh! |
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The back hairpin, where I spun earlier, is actually a double apex turn.
For the first time I manage not to overshoot the first apex going into this turn. And I successfully use the heavy rear end momentum of this car to keep the tail swinging all the way around the double apex hairpin in one long continuous slide. Listen to how little drama is coming from the throttle department. |
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My confidence level is starting to come back up again and I'm
slowly, but steadily, catching Colin's car.
If you run your stopwatch to time this one good lap from flag to flag you should come up with a time of 1 minute and 45 seconds. For comparison go back and time my first practice lap which was truly awful. Guess what? The first lap, at 1:42, was a full three seconds QUICKER! Go figure, eh. Actually, I'm still convinced this lap was WAY better than my first lap. The reason we're going so much slower now is because the meager traction available during the first lap has already degraded significantly only four laps later.
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