Hi all. Although the weekend itself was kind of nice, the overall nuisance of my back aching wasn't nice to say the least. The Sunday was the worst day so far and I was glad I didn't drive to the north of Holland as planned. Even though I like going there very much it just would have been hell getting out of the car. Seat bad remember? It's just over 220 kilometers (and the way back home is just as long of course) so it's not that I'm there after a fifteen minute drive or so, which I would have survived I'm sure :-) Of course on the Saturday I worked again so I had the chance to catch up with my dad and girlfriend to talk a bit about their holiday. The short version: it was nice, warm and way to short :-) but that is the main ingredient of a good holiday I guess. I usually feel that way about most of the weekends apart from the 'warm' bit which isn't my thing really. But I'm sure the insiders among you knew that already ;-) Eighteen to twenty degrees centigrade is more than hot enough for me. And the Saturday itself was not that bad, back wise, but then I made the crucial mistake of accepting a snooker invitation from Bas ... I know, I know, we all make mistakes but unfortunately for me this was a slightly bigger one :S About the snooker bit I can be very short: I lost all but one frame and Bas played some great snooker. If I wasn't feeling so busted I might have enjoyed watching it even more because it's always nice to see someone playing good snooker. Then there was the Sunday. Woke up at around 7.30 not knowing why exactly. My alarm clock shouldn't try to wake me before 8.30 so there really wasn't any reason for me to wake up that early. Oh well, early starts give you a bit more margin at turn one and nice long days so at that point I 'thought' things could be worse. Well they were. As soon as I tried to get up my back made me realize why it had been much better if I had not been playing snooker the night before. About 10 minutes later I was still sitting on the edge of my bed and wondering if I shouldn't roll back into bed. I didn't but it took me some time to get moving. Slightly better news with all this is that my computer chair (itself not even being remotely the best chair in the world) was the only one where I can sit really straight up so with a cup of coffee I crash landed behind my computer. Right. I'm there. Some things could have been somewhat worse I guess. That felt good as long as I wasn't moving too much and after reading some emails (and deleting 3 dozen more ...) I decided to do some racing. Driving driving :-) For quite some time since we all began racing Grand Prix Legends I held the fastest lap set on the circuit of Nurburgring. Then during the JMF Trophy race with the Dutch Simracing Zone Bas destroyed my laptime which by itself was not even that bad. Hey, the when he's faster he's faster, so who am I to argue. The reason why it hurt me so much was that he did it in a Eagle using more or less the default setup ... I cried for hours when nobody was looking ... :| I didn't start that race due to steering problems so I watched my two fellow GPRT drivers on their adventure in Germany. And I have to admit: it simply was a good lap :-) With my pole on Zandvoort the other week still fresh in my mind I thought I might as well use my Zandvoort setup on the Ring as it is almost the same sort of track, only a 'bit' longer :-) To cut a long story short: it worked! I once saw a advert for a Porsche 911 Turbo and the headline read 'Sticks like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth'. My Lotus was sticking like peanut butter on a fly catcher strip. Man it felt nice. The car was like glue. Really? Really. After talking about the new GPRT track record to my bro Stefan we came to the conclusion that my Lotus_Zandy setup from now on had to be called Lotus_Default ;-) It's just that good. So now the new track record reads 8:25.920 which means I smashed my own previous record 8:32.380 with more than 6 seconds! That this effort made me quite happy shouldn't be much of a surprise I hope. Using this happy happy joy joy feeling I immediately went to Kyalami where I had some 'business' to take care of also. Bas had been faster there for some time now also and I thought I might as well use my good mood to take the record back. This took me quite a few more laps than I had thought (I admit it was two practice sessions of an hour ...) but in the end I did it :-) I improved my own record with only 0.7 seconds but it was just enough to take the track back. Sorry maestro ;-) Now I 'only' need to go a bit faster on Mexico and Silverstone to get completely 'green' again ... We'll keep you informed ;-) However I'm sure Bas' won't keep us waiting too long and take back some records LoL Be careful when you break records, it might hurt,