MFR is Back…
Hey everyone,
After recovering from the 12hrs of Sebring it has been another busy start to the week. First up we had the Global MX-5 series, this month’s round was at Virginia International Raceway, a track I have never driven on before and only seen people drive around a handful of times on YouTube. Luckily tracks are relatively easy to learn in the Mazda as they don't have the speed or aero of GT3 cars so catching a mistake is far easier. My pace here came as a surprise and within an hour I had started to consistently put in lap times I was happy with. The race was in the evening and only twenty-five minutes, so basically a sprint for me as I'm used to endurance racing. Come Qualifying the feeling I had in practice quickly turned sour as I made mistake after mistake and couldn't put a valid lap on the board, in the end, I would be starting forty-first out of fifty-one drivers, not what I had hoped for. At the start of the race, I got caught out as I'm so used to rolling starts that I haven't done a grid start in a while. Going down to turn one with fifty-plus cars is an experience, I just tried to look after the car and not get caught up in any incidents, and it worked. This mentality was to set the tone for the rest of the race as I had the pace, got my head down and put the laps in, with a combination of pace, people taking each other out and some good overtakes I one the hard charger award for the race going from forty-first to fourth, I think a few more laps and I could have challenged for the podium, I was happy with the result though considering my poor quali effort.
Next up we had the qualifying for Season 6 of More Female Racers, a series I've enjoyed in the past and also had some success with. The qualifying is a hot lap session with the average of your ten best valid laps, I think a hot stint would be better as it would need to be consistent one lap after another but hey I don't make the rules lol, the qualifying aims to determine which class drivers need to be put in. My practice for this was setting up the car so maybe an hour tops as we had a saved set up and with a few tweaks I was up to pace and ready to put some laps in. Yvonne had already put her laps in and so I did the bare minimum of valid laps as I didn't want to put too much energy into it and be disappointed with the outcome, I was sitting in the top ten but then Yvonne did another stint and brought her average lap time down so I figured I best go again, Yvonne, Esmeralda (who is also on our team) and I were all in the same tenth come the end of qualifying and around where we are it looks like the grid will be tight again with fifteen drivers all within half a second of each other. The first round will be on the third of April and I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen.
Last up we have the RPM league on iracing, this round was at Imola, a track I have a love/hate relationship with, I am either fast here or slow. Unfortunately, it was the latter this round as I just didn't have the hot pace I've had before. Given that I knew I wasn't fast, I figured looking after the car would be my best opportunity as the other drivers are fast but make mistakes. Qualifying was distinctly average as I found a little one-lap pace but still not enough to bring me up to where I wanted to be, I ended up towards the rear of the pack. Starting further back it was again a case of playing it safe and trying to avoid the other cars as they inevitably took each other out. I made quite a few places up initially but then started slide backwards slowly one position at a time as I just couldn't keep people behind me, and to be honest I didn't want to fight them too hard as I didn't want to get any damage on the car. So driving along running my race I started to pick up pace as the fuel burnt off and started to make inroads into the cars in front, running longer in my stint also helped and a great pitstop saw me gain a lot of time on my competitors after the pitstop I managed to catch back up to Yvonne and we were not far behind the class leaders. I decided I wouldn't fight Yvonne as I figured we had a good shot at one of us getting on the last step of the podium, in the end, we just fell short by less than two seconds finishing fourth and fifth respectively although, on the last lap, I had to defend from sixth who had caught us back up, it was a little scary because I had one incident point left before receiving a drive through, so any contact or track limit violation would have dropped me way down the order due to the penalty.
The weekend we were supposed to race the VRS Endurance series but I fell ill on Friday and have had a bad few days being completely wiped out, so we decided not to do any racing and just enjoyed the F1, Indycar and Nascar instead.
See you all next week and bye for now.
