"The Incident"

Time: Saturday Night
Where: Alps Stadplatz
What: Spec Mazda biweekly series
When: Final turn of the first lap.

(Watch on Youtube for highest quality.)

So that's what happened? That doesn't look too bad. I know it wrecked your whole race, Jason. Not trying to downplay play that aspect of it. I just thought I drove through a lot more carnage. Somehow I went from sixth (I think) to third at the start of the second lap. Did people wreck just past that point?

It actually looks pretty bad.... close racing then a dive to the pits that caused everyone to take damage except wolfman!

I'm with Low... no voluntary pitting in the first 5 laps. If you take mechanical damage (non body) then pit, but the pits do not open for required stops until lap 5.

BiggLou55 wrote:It actually looks pretty bad.... close racing then a dive to the pits that caused everyone to take damage except wolfman!

Yea! My car was spotless. I didnt hit any wall or anybody

Yeah, you keep bragging there buddy. You wil feel the wrath of my horrendous driving one of these days lol.

Sounds like a plan. Important to note, however, that in a very long race it can be just as easy to be surprised by someone pitting on lap X as lap 1, 2, 3 or whatever. Burden needs to fall on the racer who is pitting to communicate with everyone, especially if another guy is right behind you. While the trailing racer normally is responsible for staying out of the back of the leader, on some tracks (like the Alps) you have very little time to react to someone slowing down to pit.

Yep... but waiting until lap5+ will help spread the field and warm the tires.

Waiting until lap 5 also ensures there is a cold tire penalty to all.. pitting at the end of lap 1 lessens the tire penalty.

it looked a lot worse from the view I was driving in... it looks like marm probably took the most damage from this view. I suppose that this jst goes to show that even the slightest tap can turn into a pretty good sized wreck. from now on I will hold off the pit stop till lap 5...

Actually, Jason and I took the most... When Jason and I came around the corner, Jason clipped Marm's front-end (which slowed him down quite a bit) and I slammed into Jason's rear-end. I was actually trying to dive to his inside to avoid the contact, but since my tires were still a little cold, I didn't have the traction to make the move. He ended up face planting into the wall and basically crippled his car... I ended up with a pretty bad front-end and both sides, which scrubbed about 10MPH from my top speed and ate about 5 seconds off my lap times (I was running low/mid 1:39's in our two practice sessions, but ended up running 1:44's in the race with a mid 1:43 fast lap)...

If you look at the race results, you can see who was damaged and who wasn't... The finishing order from Xray back is a pretty good picture of the damage severity.... We all need to remember that SIM damage carries severe consequences for major contact. Once body parts are damaged, they stay that way for the rest of the race and greatly effect the car's performance.

Well, the good thing is that we can look at this as a learning experience in multiple ways:

1. Announce when you are going to pit so this doesn't happen again

2. pit after lap 5 so that if there is contact, it isn't as severe of a situation as this

3. If your front aero is damaged, balancing it out by damaging the rear will help with top-end speed

Now that I was looking for it, it does look like jason took a lot of damage. its sort of hidden by the tire smoke, but you can see him spin directly into the wall and damage just about every panel as much as possible...

The worst damage that happened to me was when I impacted the car against the wall. That knocked out my engine and transmission. The body damage occurred after Lou and others chain-reactioned with me into the wall.

If we're tossing out suggestions, one thing that I would add is that if you are in an incident like this (the first two cars, specifically) and you're against a wall, hit your brakes and wait for traffic to pass before trying to reenter traffic. If the car against the wall here hadn't tried to pull back out into the track, I would have avoided it and the rest of the field would likely have been clean. This isn't a 3-lap public lobby race: you'll have time to work back to the front.

My apologies Jason.

I had a brain cramp with that incident. Although I'd guess I was still thinking under normal race circumstances where I would've ghosted. I'm aware of proper protocol of entering the track when it's safe. Just wasn't thinking.

My deepest and sincerest apology for ruining your race.

OK.... Everyone is sorry for something, and everyone (I hope) has been forgiven! I don't think we need to discuss this anymore, and I am locking this thread. I'll leave it up for a while, but I think this horse is now dead and the beatings need to stop...

Let's just start fresh right now and clean the slate... K?