I had to make quite a few setup changes to make this car behave somewhat the way I wanted it to; but I think the biggest difference is going from wing 5 (?) to minus 1. So much better turn-in capabilities, and I honestly didn’t feel any loss of grip.
On top of that I got really lucky. I did not have to chase down the leader for long as he decided to dive into the sand at the end of lap 1. I just tried to be smooth and consistent afterwards, keeping the other alien AI’s at bay. I succeeded, evidently – and I set a new personal best laptime too – 1:48.170.
This was also the first time I saw the “P2P” letters by the revcounter. Push to pass. I have literally never used this, but it was easy enough to adjust to. Although I did not initially have a keybinding for this, but after some digging I found out the binding is called “KERS”. They gave me 16 “charges” (?) of P2P at the start of the race. At the end I had one left. 😀
