REVIEW *** REVIEW *** REVIEW *** REVIEW *** REVIEW *** REVIEW *** REVIEW *** REVIEW *** REVIEW ***
(by P. Krüger aka Marc Romboy / Cargame.nl)
Kyoto, National Reverse. First Race of the Season for the GTA League
It's just 8 a.m. in the morning, some cloud crossing the skies, but no chances of rain for the next 3 hours. The grid was already set and everybody prepared well for the race. Some of the Rookies, Amateurs and Advanced Racers already did some great laps the whole time before the season started, driving and practicing around the different Servers hosted for the event.
After Cargame.nl signed up for the league, T. Lomp and P. Krüger (better known as Marc Romboy) did the testrace on 10th October 2010 on Aston Historic Reverse. They found out that some good races will come up, where they'll be able to finish at least in the middle field, drafting with some of the guys they already know from Cargame.nl S2 Server. This gave'm a good feeling and made the whole team proud to have a new team coming up for further endurance races and league events like this.
Sandis Sietins from Latvia was the man of the Qualifying sessions, because he did some great laps earlier on the Cargame GTR Server, which made Cargame.nl believe he can catch a fast lap, chasing with the rest of the FXR's and letting them behind him. So he did and everything was well managed to have a good race on the Japanese Circuit of Kyoto National Reverse.
S. Sietins started 17th. Well, he actually didn't started at all. Right before the Safety Car was driving away, he timed out, which was changing the whole plans the team did, so the driver ordings needed to be changed. Joris Peters who stayed in IRC and Teamspeak decided to let Jos Meerten start, right before P. Krüger. Joris Peters will do the last stint. As fast as he could Jos Meerten jumped into his seat, fasten seatbelt and drove right out of the pits, already having a lap down behind the rest of the field. Jos did a great first stint, setting a 1:41:7 as his personal fastest lap and coming into pits in lap 35, which was surely needed, after his right front tyre punctured some corners earlier.
The 19 year old german Phil Krüger is a constant, fair and fast driver. After Cargame.nl assigned for the GTA League and having Phil Krüger, better known as Marc Romboy, seen a few quick laps doing on the Cargame.nl S2 Servers, the teamleader Dave de Beer decided to have him in the team and also doing some races for the League. P. Krüger was ready for the takeover and stood right in front of the Cargame.nl pitboxes, pulling over his overall and helmet. At this point Cargame.nl was on 27th position, because some other teams also had connection problems and timed out. Jos jumped out of his car, P. Krüger got in and drove away, trying to make the best out of the situation. Accidently the team ingeneur was calculating wrong and put to much fuel in his car, so he could have been able racing to the moon and back again. However P. Krüger was trying to set some fast laps, which wasn't easy then, because there have been already too much traffic everywhere and many blue flag situations caused. As fast as he could he slowed down to let the faster cars go ahead.
2 Hours and 70 laps in total P. Krüger called Joris to connect to the server and takeover his car. P. Krüger pitted and the drama was big when the pitcrew forgot to get new tyres on the car, which means that P. Krüger needed to drive another lap on the old wasted tyres, and letting Joris still wait nervous to get in the car. This time everything went fine and Joris from the Netherlands, living and working as an Racecar Mechanic in Germany at the moment, drove out of the pits. And if the drama wasn't enough for today, he also lost his connection after half an hour racing quite good laptimes. P. Krüger wasn't either be able to leave the pits to the paddock, or to refresh himself a bit and visit the smallest room in the house (actually the smallest room on the whole circuit). Right he got the message about Joris' incident, he put on his helmet again and prepared for racing half an hour again.
With low percentage of fuel and new tyres he tried to push a bit, making better laptimes the others from his team did and just keep the engine alive to finish the race. That was the most important thing of the rest of the race now, because the amount of failing and having a problem again was enough and shouldn't be raised to a higher level, so they won't be the one team in the whole season, which everybody is talking about in a bad way. Luckily someone spin and drove into gravel at turn 4, which caused a Safety Car Situation, just 7 minutes before the 3 Hour Race would've been ended. Safety First, thats why the race was finished under Safety Car, finishing FXR's Number 19 Team Cargame.nl on P27.
After the race we talked to Joris and Phil which weren't excited at all and made a face like it was raining 7 days long.
Just a few quotes of them we could catch while they both came back to the pits and passed our reporter:
J: "What a mess, i hope this won't happen again in the upcoming races"
M: "No well, Westhill is at next, me being one of the fastest there on Cargame Server, i guess we can do better"
J: "Litro just needs to get a better PC or Internet Connection which will stay alive more than 1 hour"
M: "Yes you're right, however it was some great race, congratulations to the drivers on the podium, all other racers and the managers of the event, doing a great job."
J: "Alrighty, lets have a beer!"
Here is the rest of the result
http://tracker.newdimensionracing.com/
Stay tuned for news and upcoming quotes or comments.
Review wrote by P. Krüger, sorry for any mistakes, bad grammar and stuff like that, i'm just a normal german guy who learned strictly boring oxford english in school