The way I look at it is during qualifying I will always let faster cars go. Even if they are behind me on the clock I’ll let obviously faster cars go if, for example, they had a bad start – I don’t gain anything by holding them up and potentially having a coming together.
In finals I believe I have the right to fight for my position and if necessary make my car seem a little wider than normal. Of course, this only works when you can trust the guy behind you not to just drive through you and you tend to learn pretty quickly who you can trust to have a good clean fair race and who the others are!! When it comes to being overtaken or overtaking another car, I think you have also got to give each other a bit of respect – if someone puts a clean line on you and gets the inside line going into a corner, you really should give him the corner and try to get back past cleanly yourself later. One thing that I find frustrating is spending several laps trying to get past someone cleanly, only for them to take you out from behind at the next opportunity. The most fun racing I have is where I spend 5 minutes racing against someone of similar ability who races cleanly and we can put a few fair overtaking maneouves on each other.
I know none of us are perfect and if we all had total control of our cars we’d be world champions so we will hit each other at times but I do think there are occasions in finals where take outs are so balant that the right thing to do is wait and let the other guy go first.
I apologise in advance for all those I take out on Sunday!!
Rob
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