This race was good fun. This track is a lot of fun, it has a great flow to it. This was my first time racing here, after running a handful of laps previously, I knew it fairly well, but was still finding chunks of time as qualifying wound down. Some time was definitely left undiscovered!

Qualifying went okay, I took 8th-place. This tricky track did spread everyone out quite a bit though, I was only able to lap 1:36.843 compared to the pole time of 1:34.806. Carsten Dyndegaard took pole.

My race start was good, better than those directly ahead of me again. I had nowhere to go though, so just had to settle in, holding 6th into the first turn. The early laps it seemed like people were falling off the track all around, but in most cases all it did was helped me regain places I had lost somewhere else.

When things settled down, I ran right behind the battle for 3rd, with Ray Woolhead and Neville Britton behind me. We all seemed fairly evenly matched, and it was very intense trying to minimize errors to hold position.

Eventually, I cracked under the pressure of having Ray and Neville behind me. My mistakes cost me the positions, dropping me to 6th by lap 11. I did manage to regain composure and put the pressure right back onto Ray after he passed me, he didn’t seem comfortable, and I managed to sneak by after a small error, moving back up to 5th by lap 12.

We held position to the end of the race, with me just trying to cope with massively worn tires. It was very difficult because although I held a decent gap over the cars behind by now, I was still in contention to gain places if anybody ahead really screwed up. Eventually though, I just had to back off. Too many times I would push wide with the worn tires, and find absolutely no grip off the racing line, making it even worse. Very hard to drive in those conditions.

I finished 5th. Not too bad. I have to give a shout out to Ray as well, there were quite a few times where he could have hit me in the back. He raced nice and clean.

The video was a bit of a botched job. I formatted after the race and deleted the race replay. I had the league admin send me the server replay, and most of the footage comes from that. I did record my race while I was racing, so you can see that in the video as well.

View the official race report at Simautosport.

Croft comes next, never driven there, but I have watched it on TV. Think it’ll help? This will be the final race of the inaugural season of the Simautosport Honda BTCC Cup Season.