Season 3, race day one. Five races, one finish. The finish was a win. The other four ended on the opening lap or just after.
The pace
- Best lap this week at Barcelona: 1:34.433.
- Best race lap on race day: 1:35.146.
- The race that ran to distance: 13 clean laps, mean 1:35.95, inside a
second, with a pair of 1:35.3s in the back half.
Race trim sits about half a second off my best single lap. Fuel, traffic, tire. Normal. The lap time was in range all day.
The starts
Three of the five ended on lap one. None of it was pace. All of it was where I was when the first-lap chaos cleared.
The three opening-lap exits, read back straight:
- A lead, squeezed into a crash. I had pole in the lower split. I drifted
across the straight to kill the draft, baited an overlap, and then closed the door on it. The place was already won. Nothing to gain. The clean version is one move, then a straight line.
- The first complex, taken as if it were single file. It never is on lap
one. The full-width line assumes the inside is empty, and on the opening lap it isn't yet.
- An inside dive into a hairpin on lap one. Textbook against AI, where you
grab three at once. Against a cold, stacked human pack it's the highest-risk spot on the track, where everyone over-commits and nobody stops.
What links them
Every one of those works against AI and fails against people on a cold lap one. The moves that gain three places from a predictable field are the moves that end a race in a real one. Same corner, different game.
What I'm working on
One number, every race, until it's automatic: finish lap one in clean air. For me that means a safe line through the first complex and any opening-lap hairpin, one clean move and then straight, and conceding the place to anyone who wants it badly enough on cold tires. Position and pace aren't lap-one targets for me yet. Survival is. The pace is already there.