Race Report - VOWS Season 5 Race 5 - Istanbul, Turkey

You can watch a partial replay of the race here. The stream crashed so a lot of it was missed out. Unfortunately, there is no full replay this week.

Qualifying

Similar to Malaysia, I was not comfortable. The final sector especially was a nightmare. I was losing 3 tenths in just 3 turns. I was not expecting a good performance. My banker lap was rather slow for me, and left a lot of room for improvement. I felt I could get to at least a 1:24.2. Oh how wrong I was!

Lap after lap, I kept trying to improve by that much, and lap after lap I made mistakes. My quickest was 1:24.3. It was only a tenth off what I expected, but had I had been just that one tenth faster, I would've placed 4th, ahead of my teammate Max. Instead, I was down in 5th, one place down on him.

Race

This was the worst race of my season, by far. So that probably explains why this report is so short. My start was excellent, as appears to be tradition for the Eight-Six cars. Both Max and I shot through the middle of everyone on the launch, and we were first and second respectively by turn 1.

Half the lap went by fairly uneventfully, I was under constant pressure from Szymon and Edijs behind. Then came the dreaded turn 8. A long, 4-apex turn, it's a nightmare in dirty air. I was directly behind Max, yet somehow got a better exit. I was right on his tail come turn 9. I thought I would try a switchback, but I cut too low on the apex of turn of turn 10. I hooked my wheel over the kerb and started spinning inwards. I corrected, but too much. I went spinning off to the outside, collecting Edijs on the way.

Neither car had major damage, maybe a 20 second stop in total. However, as I rejoined, the second collision came. Edijs rolled back onto the track in front of me. The hit caused me to lose my front wing, and also slow suddenly, where I was then hit by Sean Jones, losing my rear wing in the process. The stop to repair the damage took over a minute. By that time I was a lap down on the leaders and the stop hadn't repaired my suspension.

The damage was minor enough to not DNF me right there, yet noticeable enough so that I had to really focus on not spinning the car at every turn. The rest of the race was taken up by trying not to crash out, so was fairly boring. Max crashed out a few laps from the end, making this his first DNF of the season. I finished in a lowly 13th, rounding off a race to forget. The eventual winner was Jakub Kalbarczyk, so well done to him. Thank you all for reading, next week we go to Montreal, a personal favourite of mine. Be sure to check back for that.

Thanks,

Peter J.