Hi,
congratulations to all of you who finished the ETCC '72 Silverstone event yesterday. And thanks for everyone for extremely fair driving.
It was so fun to drive the Corvette there and it was quite competent too.
I was able to catch P4 in qualification and my start was well enough to take me to lead for 4 laps. Then Sebastian Schramm got his BMW's tyres warm and I could nothing but surrender.
Then lonely driving till I had some fun with Howie Hartgas and his BMW before my first scheduled pit stop. Unfortunately Howie was a bit too eager to pass me, touched the back of my Corvette and made me spin just before I was to head to pit-in. But no hard feelings Howie, that can happen...
Had later fun with B8man and his Capri - even swapped positions and the very next curve vise versa and later again.
My 3 stop strategy worked well and the tyres lasted well to up to 2nd stop. Every time I dropped somewhere near 10th during my pit stop but after some laps I climbed back to top-3.
Did no errors and everything went well up till lap 58. I was in the middle of the main straight when my computer suddenly freezed, sound looped and that lasted for some 10-15 seconds. Then I got out of that state to continued my way but I was dropped into some psychedelic world. All the colors of track and surroundings were twisted. The track looked either white or black-white striped and those segments were wider than the track itself. After half a lap I could nothing but retire - I just couldn't drive "blind".
It was so bitter to retire from position 4 after 1:40 h but that's life, some things just are out of your control...
This same has happened to me once before. That was in Alfa-Cup at Misano but then I could drive through those couple of laps left in that twisted surroundings.
Yesterday I tried to study the reason for that and I noticed that despite I had checked "Suspend automatic updates" with my anti-virus/firewall software it still had downloaded some individual update to the virus database at that very moment. I couldn't find any proper explanation what that "Suspend automatic updates" should actually prevent, but I think next time I'll stop that service that takes care for updates to be sure that "lightning" does strike me third time.
See you at next event!
Cheers,
Timo