Apr 10
19
Simracing Team Challenge Round 4
Round 4 of the Simracing Team Challenge took place at Sugo in Japan 15/04/10
Important Update.
Thursday, 22 April 2010 12:48
Johannes Norberg scored the first win of the season to Black Visor Motorsports after an intense week inside the WAR comitee.
After a +15 seconds penalty for Marcin Skrzypczak, Norberg recovered the position that his teammate Fernando Rees lost dropping from race when he was going to score a clear victory.
With this win Black Visor is very close to the third place in standings, actually occuped by The Black Rebels. Daytona will be the first BVM assault to it as the points difference is just 10 points.
The race saw Fernando Rees debut in the STC league for BVM with Johannes Norberg making his second appearance.
In pre race testing both Fernando & Johannes showed great pace on the team server and this showed through into official practice & qualifying with Johannes posting the fastest time in practice and 3rd in quali with Fernando taking our 1st pole of the season.
Here are the race reports from our 2 drivers.
Fernando Rees
Weekend’s Report
Qualifying
Excellent lap. Risked a lot in the first sector, that fast chicane… would either go really well or really bad. Glad it worked fine. Lost about a tenth in last sector, but it was good enough to steal the pole from Marcin.
Race
Managed to hold the lead with cold tyres and brakes, and for the first 5 laps me and Marcin were in a very similar pace. I was quicker in sector 1 and 3, and he was quicker on sector 2. We were pulling away from the people behind, little by little. As soon as the rain arrived, I was suddenly much quicker. I was worried about overheating tyres in the race, but the rain helped a lot to keep them cool and optimized for grip. So I started pulling away, and when I came in the pits on lap 31 I had more or less 10.0 seconds of gap.
Pit-stop, all done, back in the lead with a similar gap of 9.0-10.0 seconds. Then it was all under control. Didn’t need to push much, was easy to pull away some more from Marcin, and Johannes in third had a similar pace to mine, closing in behind Marcin. I had a couple of incidents with backmarkers, losing about 4.0 seconds overall, but nothing too serious. Was comfortable in the lead opening lap 42 when… BOOM. Desktop… minidump…
Oh well, this was it.
Glad Johannes got a podium for us in second place. Grats to the winner and all the finishers.
See you in Daytona.
Johannes Norberg
Some words about the race 
It didn´t felt good at all the night before the race.. but that was more or less just because I was convinced that the qualification laptimes had to be 24:s to be among the top guys, and I couldn´t find that second! But during the training session on the server before qualification I noticed that the laptimes was a lot slower than I expected.. and that was nice to see..
My qualification lap was quite good. I did some small mistakes but those only added a few tenths on my laptime. I managed a 1.25.7 and that surprisingly placed me third on the grid.
I was almost 0.5 secs behind Fernando and Martin on my qualification lap.. and that difference was unchanged in the beginning of the race. They immediately started to pull away from me and I felt that I couldn´t push any harder without losing consistency at this stage.
While I lost time to the top guys, I noticed that the guys behind me was even slower than me, so I felt really comfortable in third position J And then came the rain… and I felt even better J Rain are usually to my favor and this race was no exception.. immediately I stopped losing time to Fernando and Martin in front and I think I even began catching up on Martin.
Around lap 25(i think), i did my first and only big mistake this race. I caught up a car that I was about to lap, but became very suprised by his VERY early braking point… I locked my brakes up… and ended up in his rear bumper.. 
He span out in the sand while I could continue without any big time loss. It was 100% my fault and I felt like a noob at that point. Anyway.. I have apologized to him and fortunately it seems like I got away with it (this time).
Martin did an early pit stop around lap 27 but I decided to go on and make mine as planned on lap 30. The pit stop went well but I lost some time to Martin. At this stage I was approx. 15 secs behind. During the race.. my feeling for the car had significatly improved and I could step up my race pace a bit in the second stint. The last 30 laps I was a bit faster than Martin but I only managed to eat up 10 of those 15 seconds so I had to be happy with second place.. which I definitely is!
Very sad with Fernandos mini dump though… It would have been great with both gold and bronze..
