iRacing

Riley Daytona Prototype

After last weeks bumper points haul at Road America it put me within striking distance of the top spot in division 8 so there’s plenty of motivation for the rest of the season.

I was coming to Road Atlanta as a complete rookie having never driven there before and I struggled somewhat to get and speed or consistency to begin with. Learning new tracks has never been a strong point of mine so I knew I had to just continue slogging through the laps until I started feeling comfortable. This is one tough track!

After a couple of attempts I managed a reasonable qualifying time, I seem to be unable to do much better than 75% down the qualifying times in this series and I was thereabouts again this week.

Joining the race I found myself 11th on a grid of 17 drivers rated as the #9 car so I knew I needed to pick up a few places to increase my iRating and pick up those valuable championship points.

The driver ahead decided to start from the pits so I was immediately up to 10th and altough I lost my traditional place at the start that driver slid off onto the grass in T1 leaving me a nice gap to the car in front to exercise a bit of caution going into the difficult T2-T3 section over the hill.

On lap 4 that section claimed it’s first victims finding 2 drivers stranded off-track which moved me up to 8th with 36 laps to go. At that stage I fully expected to be picking up a couple more places if I could run a mistake free race.

I was slowly pulling away from Tom Cabral and Umberto Perrotta who seemed to be having a ding-dong battle behind me and I was slowly gaining on Patrick Kluiters ahead. Coming up to half way I was only 3s behind Patrick and I was still steadily pulling back a few tenths per lap when we came across the first back-marker. I completely misread the situation when lapping which nearly ended in disaster which I narrowly avoided but lost 3s in the process. I think I lost a bit of confidence at this point as my lap times slowed and Patrick started to pull away again.

The traffic continued through the 2nd half of the race, being lapped and lapping the slower drivers. I didn’t do a great job in traffic and seemed to be losing loads of time, combined with my tyres starting to wear I was driving defensively but this was allowing Tom and Umberto to close all too quickly!

With 6 laps to go the gap was down to 5s but I knew I was  safe at that point as long as I didn’t make any mistakes which I managed and kept the 8th place over the finish line.

The result was 78 points, +28 iRating (1771) and +0.18 SR (4.42)

That takes me to 527 championship points and to the top of division 8! That’s my pre-season target of 500 points smashed as I still have another 2 races to add to the total and maybe another good result to replace the poor start to the season at Daytona where I only scored 63.

Related articles by Zemanta

• First race in the Riley MKXX Daytona Prototype (popabawa.net)
• Week 2 in the Riley – Virginia International Raceway (popabawa.net)
• Week 3 in the Riley – Sebring (popabawa.net)
• Week 5 in the Riley – Watkins Glen (popabawa.net)
• Week 7 in the Riley – Road America (popabawa.net)

Tags: Riley Daytona Prototype, Road Atlanta

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 07:51 and is filed under Cars, Racing news, Tracks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.