My Very First race weekend was a trial of fire. Everything that could have happened to make my first experience more difficult and challenging happened. We have a car that relies on ABS, and it failed. I'mc a sim racer who always practiced in the dry (including my first practice and qualifying sessions in this race weekend) and it rained. Three spins or crashes happened right in front of me. And we were hit by a tornado. But the most important thing for me was: can I bring the car back in one piece?
My first test session was surprisingly the scariest. I didn't know how the car would behave without ABS (and a friend advised that the BRZ without ABS has a very front-biased balance. As soon as I started braking into Turn 5 here at Mosport, I dramatically felt how easy it was to lock the front tires. From there I was trying to adapt and prevent the locking, but my confidence levels were already down because of the whole new experience!
On my very first run, all I did was try to feel the grip levels. The best way to do that is to be careful on entry but force a little bit more the fronts towards the apex, to feel how much rotation the car can do before starting to carry more speed on entry. The key is always to find the rotation capability BEFORE moving the braking zones further, since if you just guess a braking zone without knowing how much the car can rotate, you put yourself in a position where you can overshoot the entry and have a scary moment.
I was around two seconds slower per lap than my team mate, Nathan Blok, who is a real life driver with more than 15 years of experience. He was my benchmark. Our car was not competitive for the first round of this championship because of a problem with our Turbos, which cost around 2 seconds per lap against the top 3 competitors of our class, but since we had identical cars, I used him as a benchmark during the entire weekend.
Not only slower in laptimes, I was ridiculously careful with traffic. My spacial awareness was being developed as I drove through the session, but I preferred to be much more on the safe side until I gained confidence and my body got used to the real thing.
We're racing for ApexV2R, a racing team that focuses on the bridge between sim racing and real racing. We're racing in the Super Production Challenge Canada championship, and there were 46 cars registered for this weekend.
During the first test session, my teammate lapped a 1:39.7 and I lapped a 1.41.5.
I was almost two seconds slower. On the first qualifying session, was able to improve up to 1.39.5, 3 tenths slower than him! I was super proud to improve like that in basically one day, and the team were impressed that I was able to be 3 tenths slower on a car without ABS and TC.
That alone was a huge success on my race weekend.
Hopefully we'll become more and more competitive in the next rounds. Let's see how it goes!
Suellio Almeida, professional racing driver and coach
30 май 2022
