Hi all. Man, long weekends rule! And I'm not just talking about that extra day off but also long in terms of race duration. This past weekend I've booked one heck of a lot of laps and ditto miles in GTR. If I remember correctly my current lap count has easily passed the four thousand mark now ... :-) Bas made the difficult but brave decision not to have a race weekend (it must be cool to be able to be that strong to yourself I guess) because he wasn't quite feeling up to it and needed to recharge himself a bit but that didn't stop me from racing. When using the multiplayer internet option from within GTR there's always room to race. This weekend I've been to Spain on the Barcelona circuit, to Italy on Monza, to Germany on the old long Ring track and to Belgium doing a night race on one of my absolute favorite track Spa, just to name a few ... And specially that last one was a very cool race as it was not only dark (which is pretty common for a night race, even in Belgium :-) but it was also raining cats and dogs. Monsoon conditions. The nifty thing was that we qualified and practiced on a dry track and skipped the warm up so when the race started no-one knew it was raining. So everyone was on slicks when the race began which, in a way, is pretty funny if you can handle that *grin* The start went smooth as silk but in that first lap alone, driving and skidding to the pits to get our rain tires on, I think we lost about five cars of eighteen from drivers who spun off the track and hit a wall or damaged their cars another way. But at least they went down trying. When the first couple of guys finally had their rain tires the race could actually begin. Credit goes to all the people staying on the server and starting the race, it's not unusual on-line that they leave like crazy when faced with a wet track. Wow, what's this? Water drops falling from the sky? Where is the sun? Why am I skidding all over the place? Etc. But not this bunch, so kudo's to them. We started the race with eighteen drivers ready to do some blindfolded wet racing, just marvelous! Now I don't now about you of course but I just love rain racing. For some reason I can luckily keep myself pretty calm and make some pretty good lap times in these conditions. And in the wet the disadvantages of my Viper GTS-R not being one of the fastest or powerful cars around are somewhat less important. And added to the fun this time was that we did not only have the rain but also the dark which made it a pretty special on-line race. In the end only seven cars finished with me crossing the line in a nice third place. My Viper wasn't in the best state ever but that's what I'm paying all those expensive mechanics for, right? Can't wait for the next long or race weekend :-)