Today Team Europe attended to the 75 lap FM FOX Friday event on FE3.
It's a short but difficult track, as the track is narrow, and has some challenging corners.
Our only driver in this race was W.Lemmens. He qualified 24th to start 23rd out of 25 on the grid.
As the race went under way Lemmens took a smart choice of letting the cars behind through on the straight, to take an easy first lap. Directly in the 2nd corner we see multiple cars collide and crash out, Lemmens smartly avoids this mayhem.
A few corners later, coming on the bridge straight, 4 drivers have a huge crash and cars flying everywhere. With great avoiding skills, Lemmens marches a way through the madness! This all causing him to move up to 16th position!
But as known Lemmens is not a fast, but a consistent driver. The race continues and Lemmens keeps dropping back some positions. Until lap 9 Lemmens keeps driving slow 1:20.xx lap times. But then sets a still slow, but faster 1:18.73 lap time. By now he is till on the lead lap.
On lap 11 he is getting blue flags from the leaders, and very gently moves off the ideal line and leaves the throttle. He waits until the tight packed leading group is passed. By now he is in 19th out of 21 position. A few seconds later we see a huge moment for Lemmens, as he loses control on the second sector, whilst yielding for the blue flag. By all luck of the world, he spins into the grass and hits nobody. He continuous his way, but has dropped back to 21st.
On lap 20, Lemmens gets lapped for a second time, but hasn't made any other driver error yet. And because of his no-rage-quit spirit, even though being slow and far behind. He has moved up to 16th position, as others give up or crash out. The race goes on...
On lap 22 Lemmens makes a pit-stop to finish small damage, and refill his body with some fresh water. After a short pit-stop, he continuous his way home. The race goes on and on, up to lap 36 where Lemmens in a short lack of concentration, loses control and almost spins out of bounds. However, he manages to re-control his car, and rejoin the track.
We are now on lap 40, Lemmens has still not given up despite being on 5 laps behind the leader. This attitude has delivered him 10th position. As others do give up.
On lap 47 Lemmens puts on his fastest lap so far with a 1:18.15, still being to slow compared to the others. And on lap 53, Lemmens makes a pitstop to relax his stiff neck.
Now we're on lap 57, Lemmens is still driving and in 9th position. When very bad luck strikes him. Out of nowhere, with no single lag spike or what ever, Lemmens times out from the server. Strange however, his TS3 did not time-out and he still had connection. Sadly it was not different and his race was over. However in his first race for Team Europe, he managed to fight on and not crash out, but time-out.
We thank you for reading this long post.
Kind Regards,
Team Europe