Quote from de Souza :

Let's remove all drivers then!

On a more serious note, I should try to rewrite that part in a different way to see if it helps. We'll see.

why not put them on their own page?

They already have their own page; but it's useful for us or other visitors to know straight away where our drivers are.

SRS is proud to announce their seventh member; Dan Zanetti (D.Zanetti, SRS:Zanetti). Dan drew our attention during his time while he was teamless, after stints with SRS friend iCON Racing and Scuderia Forza. During this time Dan showed himself to be not only a competitive driver, but also a committed and helpful person as well. During our practice for the upcoming GTAL race, he has been dedicating huge amounts of time to helping us become faster and more consistent. He has already bonded well with the rest of the team, and seems to live very close to our Northern team member, James Barrington; in the wonderful town of Bradford.

SRS now has seven committed drivers, and we feel that this is enough for now. Our team is bonding well, and seven drivers is a manageable amount of drivers to, well... manage. So, for now, SRS is closed for applicants but that doesn't mean budding members shouldn't race with us! Join us on whatever server we are racing on, race clean, be friendly, and maybe you will one day have a rhyme as bad as 'Dan Can... Join SRS'.

SRS was founded in July 2008 by Tim Beaudet, Eduardo de Souza and Michael Passingham,
Visit www.simracingsociety.com for more SRS-related news and events.

Gratz

Congrats Dan !

Only 7 manageable, bunch of pussys

Congrats

Quote from jasonmatthews :

Only 7 manageable, bunch of pussys

Haha funny Jason! But grats on the pick up!

great news good luck.

Old news

What they don't see is how long it took Michael to think up something that rhymed with Dan!

Dan the man, the man that can, ill hit you with a pan... is this spam?
____

thanks for the warm welcome guys

Congrats both

You were on your way to Afghan-istan at one point... Dan...

Dan the man drove in his van. Everyone ran. Yes he can.

Some of the things on the rhyming website were great. Iran, 'gayman' and my personal favourite 'electric frying pan'.

Quote from count.bazley :

What they don't see is how long it took Michael to think up something that rhymed with Dan!

Welcome dan!

On May 9th 2009, Michael Passingham and James Barrington took to the track of Westhill for the 3 hours race, run by the GTAL.
This article contains thoughts from both the drivers; James Barrington (count.bazley, SRS:CountBazley) and Michael Passingham (Mp3 Astra, SRS:Passo)

The team had qualified in 16th position, thanks to Sonicrealms' Michael Booth helping us out when we ran out of fuel. James Barrington was at the wheel and stopped just short of his pit box, and had an empty fuel tank and needed someone to push him. Luckily, Booth was there to help!

The following is Michael's personal thoughts on the race:

'Our race was interesting and enjoyable. It was decided that James would take the first and last stints. At the initial start, James had a good chance of getting into the top 10. But because of the failure of the Master Server, the race was restarted. Unfortunately he spun on lap 1 and dropped to 24th place. Not to worry, we had plenty of time. As he got to the first pitstop, he was in the top 10, but around 14th on on the track (I can't remember). Anyway, he pitted and I took over.

I was driving slower than usual because I was so nervous. I was passed once, but was pretty happy. I was catching Timo at a fast rate but on the lap I would have passed him, I spun and caused big damage to my car. This was where the race started to go a little bit wrong.



Because of the damage, I needed to pit. But to make sure that james could make it to the end, I drove a couple more laps on the broken car. Unfortunately, we forgot about the 75% rule, assuming that we had already met the target. You're not allowed to drive for more than 2:15 in this league, which is 75% distance. I had driven for around 41 minutes which meant that when James finished, he would have driven 3 or 4 too many minutes and we would have been disqualified. We decided that James should pit with 7 mins to go, just to be sure.

In the laps leading up to the pit stop, he was blocked by a back marker and we lost around 5 seconds over several laps. Once the stop was made and I was back in the car, the craziest last laps of my LFS career took place. I was passed by a few people as I exited the pits and was 17th place. As I came through turn 2, a car which was a lap down decided that this would be a good point to pass me. Only after he had passed me did I realise that he was a lap down. At the same time, I was being lapped and going through turn 4, the car lapping me made contact and pushed me into the gravel. This was frustrating mainly because this allowed the other XRR to pass us and meant one of my targets would be lost. However, there were some happy moments to come.

With 2 laps to go, I was fighting with an FZR and swapping positions with him. On the final lap of the race, it looks like he realised he didn't have enough fuel, and started to slow. I initially hit him up the rear because he was travelling so slowly. It was after I passed him that James noticed that Laprevotte was very slow ahead of me, and that I had made 10 seconds on him in a single lap. Coming into the final corner, he was very wide and I stuck my car into the gap, getting totally sideways on tyres that wouldn't last another lap because they were freezing cold. Amazingly, I got alongside and used the XRR's grunt to beat him by half a second.

This was an amazing end to the race! It turns out that Laprevotte had had a puncture and was struggling. He was very unlucky to be caught by us where he did, because he was having a hard time turning left and that final corner is a very tricky left-hander.



So, we got 15th place. BUT, 3rd place was disqualifed and 1st place was the guest car of #low so we ended up 13th. This is a 5 place improvement on our previous race. Coming into Fern Bay, we are extremely confident of another top 15 finish. And, who knows, maybe even better.....'
Michael created this video to show the final lap of the race and its thrilling conclusion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ie_rL-8Nr8

Here are James Barrington's thoughts on the race:
'Top 10 was definitely possible, before the race was stopped I was within 20 seconds of the leaders after 20 minutes. Unfortunately as you know, I had a very unfortunate slide on the cold tyres and lost 9 places on the first lap.

I pushed on and knew that many people would fall off the track. By the time the first stops began I was up to 13th I think, and then inside the top 10 by the time a few others had stopped and I had to hand over to Michael. Had a long stop to repair the damage from my spin, it wasn't too heavy but I didn't want Michael to have to try drive an hour with a car the wasn't driving straight. Michael did a good solid stint and was poised to overtake Hynninen when he went off at the chicane. I took over with about 70 minutes to go and began to push on to recover the lost ground from having to repair the car once again. All was going well, managed to pass a few cars and set about giving us as big a gap as I could once we found out we needed to put Michael back in the car. Unfortunately the #25 would not let us through under blue flags and completely broke my rhythm, after which point the tyres were cold and I could no longer push fully. I handed over to Michael, seems the front right also got changed in the stop which cost us a few seconds.

A few corners later Michael got bounced off the track but luckily didn't lose too much time. I gave him the one lap to go signal and basically let him know we had nothing to lose as the car behind us was behind the leaders and would finish a lap behind us.

The rest is history and one of the greatest final laps I've had the pleasure of viewing in endurance racing. Congrats Michael, I know I said it about 20 times as you crossed the line but that really was an exceptional performance to jump in the car with stone cold tyres and five minutes to go.'

And the final word goes to Craig Taylor (TAYLOR-MANIA, SRS:Taylor), who analysed our performance:
'Seems like it was an interesting race right up to the end. What a drive that must've been from James after the spin on the restart ?! We've gotta be happy with such an improvement, so well done.

If only we can rid ourselves of those small gremlins that we seem to encounter... we can surely build on this improvement if we can avoid those mistakes. But of course, that's easier said that done. However, without spinning or crashing or getting held up by back markers in some way, even this round it seems that a top 10 placement was within grasp.'

SRS was founded in July 2008 by Tim Beaudet, Eduardo de Souza and Michael Passingham,
Visit www.simracingsociety.com for more SRS-related news and events.

Well done guys, great to see the improvement already

Haha, completely forgot about about my little mistake in qualifying. I was sat about a metre short of a pitbox waiting to see if we could get hold of Boothy to push me forwards, at which point he drove past me down the pits! But thankfully he reversed up and gave me a quick nudge. Thanks Boothy and Sonicrealms!

Quote from count.bazley :

Haha, completely forgot about about my little mistake in qualifying. I was sat about a metre short of a pitbox waiting to see if we could get hold of Boothy to push me forwards, at which point he drove past me down the pits! But thankfully he reversed up and gave me a quick nudge. Thanks Boothy and Sonicrealms!

Boothy? Useful? Kind? Did you bribe him with more Aldi products for his PC or something?

Nice report there. Really I still can't belive we had this puncture so close to the finish.

Btw, it's Laprevotte, not Laprovotte.

Quote from GreyBull [CHA] :

Nice report there. Really I still can't belive we had this puncture so close to the finish.

Btw, it's Laprevotte, not Laprovotte.

Apologies. I thought it was Laprevotte but it looked wrong. I'll change that now.

Quote from GreyBull [CHA] :

Nice report there. Really I still can't belive we had this puncture so close to the finish.

Well if we hadn't done those accidental downshifts... and if I hadn't spun and lost 6-8 seconds... Perhaps I should start using the seq. shifter since the paddle is soo sucky?

Quote :

Btw, it's Laprevotte, not Laprovotte.

You did notice they only refer to me as 'Timo' so I guess they have problems with spelling Perhaps I should abbeviate myself as 'T.H Nen'? By that logic you'd be ...err 'L.Votte

Hey, I used your surname Timo (I had to look it up first though)!