***pit reaching 30C (86F). Having long run out of adrenaline, valiant
J. Ketola is shedding buckets of sweat trying to tame his Lotus49
around the twisty track in the beautiful Canadian countryside. Constantly
lapping at hi 1:23's - low 1:24's he finds the track more annoying than
anything else. Any attempt to push even a fraction harder results into an
inevitable spin. But today he is determined.
Then, all of a sudden, on lap 12 he nails it. A time of 1m22.92s puts him
two tenths ahead of Doug Arnao's "benchmark" time, and - more importantly
- a whole eight tenths below the magical Papyrus benchmark time. And the
celebrations go on through the night!
Okay, I don't generally speak about myself in third person :-)
So yeah, a negative GPLRank after months of joy and grief (mostly joy,
though). I made my first submission to GPLRank on 2000-10-10 07:01:37 and
had a blinding handicap of 206.74. After getting in a decent lap at the
ring I really started working on my handicap in December 2000. I managed
to push down from 150 to about 50 in December, and down to around 30s in
January. Unfortunately I didn't have the time nor patience to put down
enough laps to bring my laptimes down any further, and I *really* didn't
have the patience and consistency to put down a clean lap at the Ring.
So I was stuck with a handicap of 30 and a Ring time of 8:48 for months
with little intrest in working on it further. Meanwhile I took part in an
F2F3 series and a Spring Series organized by the Finnish GPL
Championships. The long races really helped me improve my driving and by
the final race of the Spring Series at the Nrburgring I was already
to put down several relatively fast (around 8:30) laps without crashing.
At the race itself I ran out of fuel which *really* pissed me off since
a finish at a race in the Ring had been a dream come true.
The very next day, June 6th, I attacked the Ring. I bit its ankle, kicked
its knee, and pulled its hair. And it caved in! I managed to put down
a 8:24 lap which brought my handicap down to 6.15s. After that I put down
a couple of laps at Silverstone, Monaco, Rouen, Mexico, and now Mosport,
and shaved away some of the seconds I knew were lurking around the tight
bends. Luckily I found 6.97 of them, which puts my handicap to -0.82.
I would like to thank the following persons (in no particular order) for
aiding me in my Quest.
Malcolm Edeson for his excellent GPLegs package.
Tauno Taipaleenm?ki for countless tips and continuous spurring.
FGPLC for great on-line races.
Samuli Takala for his work with FGPLC.
Eldred Pickett for motivation. A negative St. Eldred's ranking was my
number one goal for a very long time indeed.
Don Scurlock and Uwe Schuerkamp for GPLRank. That's fairly obvious though,
I guess :)
Greger Huttu for some excellent (and some impossible) Lotus setups.
Kai T?rm?nen for his Kyalami setup.
Jonas Matton and Martin Granberg for GPL Replay Analyser
Everyone out there releasing tools, modifications, and tracks that keep
this masterpiece feeling as fresh as the day it came out of box.
And Papyrus.
Sincere apologies to everyone I forgot to mention - I'm sure there are
many of you out there. I'm actually surprise if anyone had the stamina to
make it all the way down here :-)
So here we are, late 60's, going on 2001, and I just can't get enough.
Minus ten, here I come!
-Jari
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( Y ) : The University of Oulu Department of Electrical Engineering
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