F1 2021, Co-Op, S01, R16, Abu Dhabi

I promise you that I want to get better at this track. But it's another that I really struggle with. Can't seem to get a good grasp of it. I have done some laps since this race and am at the point where I can keep up with my teammate, I think, but I can't find a way to pull out a gap at all. Actually, I think the track was quite easy back in F1 2010. But hell, that was a long time ago.

One more race and we get down to the nitty gritty of season-end items and contract negotiations, etc. I will have to take a brief break from these race updates to collect all that data, double-check the yearly worksheet to make sure it looks okay, and will have to do some serious work on the wiki pages: they are a big casualty of modifying to make the sheet be only 16 races long but I didn't have the motivation to create fake data to work with so I've been waiting until the first season was over.

Also, I'm going to try to find a way to measure the R&D chart; might just be eyeballing it but I'll try to be as accurate as possible so I can step back and look at some of the outlier performances of the season.

On to Abu Dhabi:

Terrible round for me; I don't think I crashed out or anything, but rather just shut it down. I may have had an engine issue or something too, but wouldn't bet on it. I'm just bad there.

Brett had a great race. Probably his best race of the year. I got to watch the second half from his T-cam and, although he had a big train behind him, he kept composure and didn't let almost anyone by and brought it home jusssssst outside the points.

Elsewhere in the field, Sainz had another nice run to beat out Ricciardo, and Lando increased his gap to Leclerc for P5. McLaren held onto P3 in the WCC, barely, and Tsunoda beat Gasly and scored points for only the third time all season.

Not a good day for me, but a pleasure to see Brett have a solid day (especially since he didn't score any points hah) and very excited to get season 2 underway--actually, the time of writing this, we are up to race 14 of an identical 2022 schedule. But I'm hoping to be less behind my the time season 3 gets going.