Racing with Ghost Cars

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Third week of the current SRS championships with a lot of wins, twists and glitches for the 4Fun racers. The headlines are obviously for Omer Kinay, that after dismissing the clothes of Emperor Omerius wore back his laurel crowned helmet on and leaped to the Mugello track for his first comeback race. After an initial dismay – he setupped his tablet instead of his Audi TT and was about to watch the SRS YouTube stream of the race as he did in the past month before suddenly recall that he had to be on the track – Kinay swept off the rust from his elbows and clinched a solid 2nd place in his second try. “Finally I relish again those sublime racing feelings”, declared Kinay four hours after his first race since he made 120 more laps alone on the track “although after my comeback I noticed some strange changes I still don’t understand. For instance, there were drivers before me. Weird, this wasn’t possible according to my racing data”.

While people waits for Kinay back to the top of the hill, Matteo Venuti piled up the usual amount of wins (and his 100th among them) after preparing the race week with his standard meticulous practice – that is a single half lap in one track in which he broke three track laptime records. Venuti grabbed two wins (well, one win – see below) in Mugello with the Audi TT, one win in Most with the Lotus Evora, one win in Laguna Seca with the Mazda MX-5, a third place in Silverstone with the Ginetta GT4 and a fifth place in Le Mans ’67 with the Mazda 787B – by the way, after the end of the season all Venuti’s results will be collected in 12 deluxe volumes with leather hardcover and a foreword from Lewis Hamilton. Preorder them in your favourite bookstore!

Venuti also raced in Mugello along with his teammates Dario Bucalo and Gianluca Roncaglia, and the guys of 4Fun showed their skills gaining the first three places of the starting grid in qualification. While Venuti immediately rocketed from his pole position and calmly drove to the win sipping a cup of tea, Bucalo and Roncaglia lost a position and engaged a hard but fair and gallant fight (“Would you allow me to brutally shut you the door before the hairpin, Milord?” “You are welcome to do so, my noble friend”) for the third place, with Roncaglia finally able to overtake Bucalo right before the end after using all his P2P simultaneously and almost melting his engine in the end of the pit straight. Unfortunately, this beautiful fight will remain a racing ghost since the results weren’t recorded on SRS due to a server glitch. What a pity! The race rankings flied lost in the ether and finally landed somewhere, with Matteo Venuti resulting then as the winner of a Nascar race in Indianapolis.

While Gianluca Roncaglia, despite his sleepy driving in Laguna Seca with the Mazda MX-5 (only a 5th place for him in two tries), was able to save the day with a win in his final race in Mugello, Dario Bucalo was prone to bad luck throughout the week, although he was at least able to catch a noticeable 3rd place thanks to an overtake just inches before the finish line. Very comfortable on his Audi in the Mugello track, after a hard fight during one of his races Bucalo was heading for a brilliant win before getting disconnected from the server with only one lap to go. After a cold shower and six hours of yoga meditation to calm down, he immediately prosecuted his phone company, being refunded with an Audi-branded cellphone case. Reporters called Bucalo on the phone to hear of his unlucky race, but he was only able to declare “Well, I was…” before the call was interrupted due to connection issues. Better luck next time, and stay tuned for —— Server Hangup. Please Retry Later.

Playlist of the week:

The Police – Ghost in the Machine

Led Zeppelin – Communication Breakdown (for Dario Bucalo)

Huey Lewis & The News – Back in Time (for Omer Kinay)

Bee Gees – You Win Again (for Matteo Venuti)

Johann Sebastian Bach – The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2, performed by Glenn Gould (for Gianluca Roncaglia)

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