4X Racing

Sunday 27th November... The return of Marc Figueras After 3 weeks of moving house, Marc Figueras was finally back on track this Sunday to compete in the Absolute Beginners League (ABL) in Spa Francochamps with the Skippy. Below is how he experienced the night. 18:45 while having dinner, Andy messaged me to join the race, I had 1 hour till qualifying started, my PC was still in a box, my internet cable not connected to the patch cabinet yet, and dinner was too good to leave. 19:30 Having munched down dinner, fighting with the network cable in the patch cabinet and hooking up all my PC bits, I didn't have internet (or a working mouse). 15 minutes till qualifying so I hunkered down, and started fixing the problems. 19:45 Internet rerouted thought another room, my PC was now the only one in the house online!! The rest still have WiFi only, I stole the mouse off my kid and got on Discord to tell Andy I was coming. OF COURSE my sound didn't work and neither did my mic.... meanwhile I was trying to get iRacing to load which was being a slowpoke again. 19:55 FINALLY my sound worked, I got into the session, and when it loaded I had 3 min to check my steering and pedals (which I hadn't been able to test yet). Everything looked ok, so I ran upstairs to get a drink, some more pie, a cable for my Phone for irPitCrew and rush to the bathroom before the start. With a cool 43 seconds before gridding stopped, I got back and we were good to go. With 0 practice and 2 weeks of not driving, this was bound to be good. I started 33rd, but with some aggressive passing and pretending to be Max Verstappen I was quickly up to 17th. Although I could already see the incidents where going to be a problem (as per usual on SPA). I managed to stretch the 1st fuel run to over half the race, so wasn't to worried about fuel, and later in the race even got to 8th position due to all the people dropping off. I was still getting far too many off tracks, and started communicating to my team that I was scared I wouldn't make it. The last part of the race I got closer to Rodrigo Capeleto again, who had passed me earlier. and the previous lap on Kemmel Straight I got past him, but got re-passed on the same straight in the last lap. Then, with a good run out of turn 15 towards Blanchimont, I pretended to be Max again, by choosing the outside line, and with only 2 incidents left from a DQ. I did not want to crash. We go into the corner 2 wide.... CONTACT... I see a 0x appearing on my text chat and think to myself,  "Thank god it wasn't a 4x and we are both still going"... and as I watch in my mirror, I see Rodrigo losing control of his car, and the contact being upgraded from 0x to 4x... ending my race with a DQ... 1 chicane short of finally finishing a Spa race in the ABL... guess I'll have to try again next year...! The race itself was fun, action packed and moving through the field from 33rd to 7th at one point really was a good experience, I just gotta watch them offtracks @ SPA!