Weekend Open F1/WRL Thread
All subscribers welcome
Just this once we will break with tradition: feel free to discuss the Abu Dhabi race, and the F1 championship, throughout the weekend.
If you haven’t yet watched the press conference featuring the top three, it’s good fun. YouTube won’t let me embed it, unfortunately.
Also happening: the “World” Racing League at COTA. Our good friend Matt Farah is joining Tommy Kendall, Super Trofeo spank Mateo Siederman, and noted Pikes Peak competitor Jonny Lieberman in a freebie ride driving one of the BMW M235i body-in-white race cars that debuted for World Challenge before moving to WRL. I’ve been faster than three of these four guys in our races together; I don’t know Mateo at all. (To be fair the event I did with Tommy Kendall was a glorified autocross in 2006, and I was the top time of 66 drivers that day, so I think I had some luck on my side.)
So far, Matt and company have qualified 12th of 22 in their class, four and a half seconds off the front, with their sister car from the same provider qualifying 9th of 22. All of the times seem awful slow to me, but I’ve only driven COTA once in my life, for a total of 18 laps, running 2:20 in a street-tired 2015 Huracan against the 2:29-2:35 of the GP1 class today. The goober-grifters from Round 3 are leading the top-rung qualifying doing 2:18.5 in a fully prepped Sebeco; Jon Field, who is very much a gentleman driver, ran a 2:05.1 in a Radical SR8 down there and really the Sebecos shouldn’t be that far behind.
Under normal circumstances I’d say something catty about Jonny but let’s be honest: when you have failed at each and every timed driving event you have ever attempted over the course of seventeen years, including one embarrassing thing where he couldn’t even drive as fast in a straight line as random mommybloggers, it takes a sort of raw courage and self-esteem to keep going nevertheless. It took me 4 months to win a BMX race for the first time, and that felt discouraging. Imagine being dead last, or near to it, for 17 years. I’d have sucked off a Mossberg by Year 5.
So let’s put on our encouragement hats here and wish them the best!
Now, I know a lot of you were on the edge of your seats about this, but: Matt and Jonny finished dead last in class among cars that were running at the end of the race, and 11th of the 20 cars in class that managed to turn laps at all during the race. They were 16 laps behind the winners in class.
As far as I can tell, Jonny's stint was near the end. He put in a non-robust 25 laps that were between 14 and 25 seconds a lap off the team pace. This caused the team to drop 5 places overall so someone finally decided to stop the bleeding at that point.
To put it in perspective, the other drivers did between 35 and 42 laps.
Matt Farah was generally about 6 seconds a lap off team pace during his stint.
Given that Jonny spent the days before the race driving a new Ferrari in Portugal, maybe he was just frustrated at the non-exoticness of his BMW M235i race car?
On a more positive note, it looks like the car only went off track seriously once.
More exciting results tomorrow!
Late breaking news -- the #62 M235i won their class today!
I've asked Matt to clarify who did the driving -- from what I can see, it was a lot of Tommy Kendall, a lot of Mateo Whatshisname, a little Matt, and no Jonny at all. They also got lucky with some retirements and other problems for their competitors. That being said, you gotta finish a race to win it!