Racing Tak

ISRC Season 7, Race 2
Derelik

Takashi Kurosawa is back.

I know. He is so good it is almost not funny.

Last Sunday's race was the first after the Seyllin disaster and after space started acting weird. Some people are still grieving Seyllin, I understand that several others have been going into "wormspace" to explore and some simply dropped out of sight. I am grateful, however, for those of you that checked in and let me know they were OK :)

Anyhow as a result, the mood before the race was a bit eerie... I think the DVR team showed up in force, but we in SDS were missing people and VRT brought a single racer, Tak. We briefly considered switching the race to "exhibition" and not score it, but decided not to. It would be for real.

Well, in a word, our inty team did not have a good race.

Did I mention I ran inty this time? No one else showed up in Assault Frigates, so I would be either racing myself, or having fun against the inty jockeys. I decided to go for fun.

We lined up and went off, and Takashi started doing what he does best, gain a few seconds on each jump. I thought I had fixed that, I could swear I was gating faster than before but, meh, he still was pulling slowly ahead. So was Kazuo.

Never mind. I would catch them at the multiple waypoints. That is what I do best.

Only I, ah, omitted turning off overload on my MWD at one of those waypoints. >POOF<

After a brief dock, repair, undock in system (got lucky, I had not checked whether there was a repair shop in system but it was there) I found myself one minute behind the pack.

Enter our lovely warp train. I was able to climb my way back into the pack and then into 3rd place overall, but it was not meant to be. This was a race with so many jumps, I was falling a bit behind on each one, only to recover several seconds at the next waypoint, then falling behind...

Note to self: work on figuring out how to gate faster.

Then there was this waypoint at a star and, surprise, surprise, we can no longer use the solar system map the way we could before. Pod changes. I must have lost another half minute there.

And in the end, demon overtook me I think on WP14 or 15 on his Firetail. He is doing that to us every race now, no matter how many times we fire and rehire him. It is good to have him on the team but, oh, does he have to humiliate us every time?

Not that we did not deserve it this time.

Anyway, Kay had an awful race too. Apparently she missed every single gate by a few meters, had a couple of misswarps and finally her pod shut down on the last stretch. Someone in the fit crew is going to get so fired.

We came in, I think FIVE MINUTES behind the lead and made 3rd and 4th places. But we carried frigates :)

So at this point I am considering whether I will be switching permanently to inties now. The AF class is OK, I guess, but interceptor racing is shaping up to be all the rage.

Because, ladies and gentelemen, the Tak is Back.

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