Robert Gray

Week 2 of the Star Mazda is Leguna Seca, home of the infamous "cork-screw". Last season both Andy and I hit the track for a race and came together on the first corner. We ultimately finished 2nd and 3rd in that first race. I had a few more troubles, coming together with Steve Owen, getting reversed into off the grid by Paul Ezerski...

Round one of season four hit Road America this week. For me, it was to be my first every V8supercar event, after finishing 2nd in division four of the other main C class series, the Star Mazda. Fuel saving made it introduced a new dimension to the race, and I liked it.

The Star Mazda is a pretty easy car to drive. The light weight, the massive grip both mechanical and aero, the open wheel nature, all lend itself to a pretty easy car to drive from the get-go. The Ford V8SC is anything but easy. It's a twitching, bucking, yelling, screaming beast. The Star Mazda is a refined, well mannered, upper-middle class car. The V8SC is a beer swilling, loud, obnoxious beast. But that's what makes it interesting...

Mammoth Networks now sponsor my racing efforts. How so? They donated a VPS to run this blog. That and I work at Mammoth Media / Ausgamers. I like the colours too. Now if only they kick in some shiny 27" monitors...

I had the best race of the season at Road America. Battling with the big boys and making a huge iRating and SR gain. Love this track. I started off the week pretty calmly and using my standard race preparation: Run the track with my default setup (32 Front and 31 Rear wings), incidentally the same wing settings I've used all season so far. The tuesday session is meant to be an acclimitisation session to familiarise myself with the track...

Importantly for me, a B class driver, I was the first the B class drivers and ahead of real life V8 Supercar regular David Besnard. I even think there's plenty more to come there is plenty more to come, after setting an optimal time of 1:21.622 and missing 15 minutes of setup time in the session after an iRacing error denied me access to the Garage with a "Bad setup file" error. I'm also yet to refine setup work and will continue development of a qualifying setup through the week, before focussing on a race setup on Friday/Saturday.

iRacing's Season 3 for 2012 begins today, with the Star Mazdas taking to Brands Hatch in England for round one of the twelve round season. This season I've made up my own paint, with the my work, Charm Health, as primary sponsor. I've also got Microsoft on the engine cover, with my fuel sponsor BP on the nose. The paint scheme is Charm Healths

I explain how to modify the look and feel of a GridView in WPF

I wished Codemasters F1 201x had a telemetry application. It didn't, so I made my own.

Cross join with filter equals inner join with filter. A little experiment to test what Sql Server with it's query optimisation and with how linq does it's magic.

Decent enough speed but terrible mistakes on the opening lap of both races cost me.

I've got my A class license and I'm moving up from the Skip Barber to the Star Mazda for season 2

Don't use FizzBuzz to filter out bad senior developers.

Some initial observations on life as a public sector software developer, one month in.

Codemasters publishes telemetry data packets you can receive to make your own telemetry based applications.