September 11, 2011 - Another stop before the second and third stages.
These were run through Torbay, which is a town stage that alternates fast roads with tight corners. I remember from 2008 that this was an eye-opener about the speed in close quarters. I actually remembered it quite well from last time, so I was less worried. And it went well. The car is still super-fast and I'm getting a better handle on exactly how tight a "medium right" corner is. They seem slower than I remember, but that could simply be due to the speed between the corners. Just like 2008, we finished the second run through the stage right on the tail of the car that started 30s in front of us. That's got to be a good sign. On that run, we hit 160 kmh. In someone's neighborhood.
So, how did we do? Well, these stages aren't scored at all. They're for shakedown. But we are given base times, which we used as a sanity check to get an idea of how we should sit in the class. And we beat our base time by approximately 17 seconds in all three cases. When the times were published by the end of the day, we tied for third on the first stage and fourth on the second. The times for the third stage don't appear to be printed yet. So we've got the speed, and we can afford to be cautious where we need to be cautious and make up for it on the easier sections. Excellent.
tags: 2011 race, prologue, Torbay |
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