After the race has been completed and the points all tallied up, the leas passing back to Kamui Kobayashi it has come to my attention that somehow this little corner of the internet - one of many corners I hide in has attained over 1000 views which is a nice milestone meaning somewhere some people actually read this which is personally very impressive.
Now that announcement is out of the way the main purpose of this little addition beyond the normal three-post routine is to release a video which should have been ready for the post-qualifying post. However this took until half one in the morning to upload to YouTube - luckily most folk had gone to sleep by then so I could take up the internet for my own devious needs.
Because it was the German GP at the famous Nurburgring it was only a matter of time before the blogmobile - the DP01 version was taken out into the Eiffel Mountains for a lap of the monolithic Nordschleife. 21km of undulating road bordered by threatening steel armco barriers waiting to punish any mistake in a very expensive and destructive manner. With somewhere in the region of 150 corners depending on how they are counted the track is among the most challenging laps on the surface of the planet, dubbed the 'Green Hell' by those who've encountered it.
So in the words of Jeremy Clarkson "How hard can it be?" - driving the open-wheel race car out of the toll gates and onto the track. There were many accidents in the quest for a lap with a representative time of any sorts. It certainly is a relief virtual racing is painless or I'd have broken many bones colliding with the barriers and sailing into the forest beyond shedding wings and wheels in the process. Amidst the fragments times started to tumble falling from the initial efforts close to 7 minutes - seconds evaporated as the spins and excursions became less frequent . Then there was the first - a clean lap without spinning, without damage at a reasonable pace - somehow I'd remembered the track yielding a 6:06.
Now it was a case of going faster, making fewer mistakes and knock away some more seconds - knowing breaking under the 6 minute barrier was possible. As the pace increased so did the rate the walls zoomed past the cockpit - and so did the speed I hit them at - pushing for those extra seconds to be trimmed off. I could be driving the layout for days on end for that quest so instead here is the closest I got on a 6:01.975 - I am all too aware there is more time available and it is by far and away not the fastest time this car can lap the Nordschleife. Running a little wide in some corners and some oversteer in others, that and generally not being the fastest driver by a considerable margin in the virtual arena - only ever being mid-field at best in online competitions. But time to put all that aside and here is the Blogmobile's visit to the Nurburgring
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