1st slot - missed because I didn't realise the times had changed by an hour.
2nd slot - qualified 5th, got swamped by very aggressive driving early on, ended up nearly last.
3rd slot - was on for a qualifying lap that would have been 1st or 2nd, but despite having left a couple of seconds gap to the car ahead at the start of my lap, I'd caught them up 40 seconds into the lap. Couldn't get past them, so went from 0.6 up on my 1st lap at the 40 second mark to 0.1 up at the end of the lap. That put me 6th on the grid. Resolved to hold my position better than in the previous race during the first lap or two, but the whole race had a lot of pretty dirty driving, including at one point someone blatantly rear ending me out of the way to pass me, despite it being clear I was faster than them at that point in the race (I had just passed them cleanly on the previous corner). There was a LOT of that on display during the race. The race was largely a traffic jam from start to finish, but somehow I managed to get a clear track at some key points and was able to extend one stint as I could see I was growing the gap to the car behind. Whether I could salvage some worthwhile points all came down to my final lap which was a 1 lap stint on the hards. They might be slow, but they were faster than whatever the 2 cars right in front of me on the track had on, and there was some very intense battling on that last lap. I felt I kept it completely clean in managing to pass the two cars in front of me by the end of the lap, to scrape 4th place for a net gain of 240 or so points, which might yet turn out to be crucial in the fight for a top 10 spot in the Honda ranking. It's annoying that the winning time was slower than I've routinely been doing in practice, but there's little chance of doing that time unless you can get pole and open up a gap. Lap 2, for example, was 3 seconds slower than I'd have done with a clear track.
View attachment 861763