TMR Game – Week 16

Welcome to Week 16 of the Too Much Racing Game!

[picapp align=”right” wrap=”false” link=”term=WRC+New+Zealand&iid=8729946″ src=”4/3/6/b/Rally_New_Zealand_c1c1.jpg?adImageId=12824158&imageId=8729946″ width=”380″ height=”253″ /]

First of all, I hope you like the new theme! I think it makes things easier to read as the text doesn’t get lost in the background, and the links and other devices aren’t cluttered in one place.  [Photo – Petter Solberg at Rally New Zealand, ZumaPress via Picapp]

You can read my thoughts on the Spanish GP in my previous post, I heard the LMS was utterly chaotic but a good race, I look forward to catching up with it. I saw the highlights of the WRC New Zealand, and what a turn of events – Loeb fell to 8th nearly 2 minutes down on day 1, but fought back valiantly to close the gap in one of the best comeback drives rallying has seen on day 2, before on the final day both he and his fellow previous frontrunners all encountered spins (including a retirement for Petter) and allowed the consistent Latvala to take the win on the final stage!

Quick-Start

Racing this week:

Formula 1 – Monaco GP;

Sprint Cup – Dover, Delaware;

Usual restrictions apply, pick up to 10 drivers, no more than 7 from one race.

The cutoff is Saturday 15th May at 4.59am BST (British Summer Time = GMT+1), that’s 11.59pm Friday night US EDT.

For the full results from Week 15, read on.

Admin

Due to the lack of DNF results for the WRC I’m unable to award lower-order points to Petter Solberg as I would in other series, it would mean trawling through the timesheets for each stage to work out the order of retirements (for every car and discounting those returning under SuperRally), and if I do that for a rally where that would be relatively easy (i.e. this one), that would set the precedent to have to do it for rallies when someone retires on day one, and I don’t have time to do that for up to 25 stages in a rally. This fact added to the Thursday/Friday running in rallying may cost the WRC a place in the TMRG next year should the game continue.

Sebastian has led a discussion in the comments regarding the use of Carryovers in the case of not receiving an entry, and instead using a notional score representing a percentage of the lowest scored achieved by a full-entry. e.g. last week Startledbunny was the lowest scorer, and we’d give non-entries between 50-70% of that score (a percentage would be agreed). I was sceptical when the idea was raised early in the life of the game, having seen how things are panning out I can see the merits of it and how the carryover system which works elsewhere doesn’t work in this case because we’re playing with different series from week to week, most of the time. It is too late to adapt the game for this season, it wouldn’t be right to run to two systems in a year or to apply new scores retrospectively, but the idea is worth revisiting for 2011.

I’m also going to be updating the Game page linked through the header when I get a ten or fifteen minutes to focus on it, it needs reworking into a more useful resource.

After the excitement of these four events we have a quieter weekend ahead with just the two races, though one of them is a classic.

How To Enter

1. Reply to this post.

2. List up to 10 drivers, with no more than 7 from a single event.

3. Send your entry before the stated deadline, usually some time on a Friday. You can make as many changes as you like until the closing point, I’ll take your last entry.

Most weeks feature 2 or 3 races, some weeks may have more than that and some may only have one. There’s not a rule stating you have to choose a driver in each race, any combination of up to 10 drivers is accepted.

On to the results!

Top Tens – Week 15

	Week 15	Formula 1	WRC	NASCAR Cup
	Points	Barcelona	New Zealand	Darlington
1	50	Mark Webber	Jari-Matti Latvala	Denny Hamlin
2	40	Fernando Alonso	Sebastien Ogier	Jamie McMurray
3	35	Sebastian Vettel	Sebastien Loeb	Kurt Busch
4	32	Michael Schumacher	Mikko Hirvonen	Jeff Gordon
5	30	Jenson Button	Dani Sordo	Juan Montoya
6	28	Felipe Massa	Matthew Wilson	Kevin Harvick
7	26	Adrian Sutil	Henning Solberg	Kyle Busch
8	24	Robert Kubica	Jari Ketomaa	Jeff Burton
9	22	Rubens Barrichello	Federico Villagra	Ryan Newman
10	20	Jaime Alguersuari	Xavier Pons	Brian Vickers
		Le Mans Series
	Points	Spa-Franchorchamps
1	50	Lamy / Bourdais / Pagenaud
2	40	Montagny / Sarrazin
3	35	Capello / Kristensen / McNish
4	32	Gene / Wurz / Davidson
5	30	Bernhard / Dumas / Rockenfeller
6	28	Amaral / Pla
7	26	Erdos / Newton / Wallace
8	24	Moreau / Hein
9	22	Layahe / Nicolet
10	20	Geri / A.Piccini / G.Piccini

EDIT – I forgot that Minassian did not race. I have updated the scoring, apologies.

Hamilton’s misfortune with his wheel rim or tyre delamination (whatever it was!) did cost a few people some points. Everybody who picked an F1 driver chose Vettel, I’m happy to say I was the only one to choose Webber! Quite pleased with that, I was worried he’d get squeezed out again and I think most were thinking along the same lines.

I haven’t caught up with the Cup race at all other than to score the drivers, it seems to be a very different order to usual though! Not all that many of us chose drivers in the series though so perhaps the points loss relative to others wasn’t so bad.

With Loeb 3rd and most people’s second-pick Hirvonen 4th there was a reasonble haul of points, perhaps not as much as people were expecting though. Some did go for Ogier as well and they were rewarded.

All of our picks finished in the top four of the LMS, though with all kinds of combinations chosen it was again the sportscar race which defined the overall points scores we received this week. I’m not sure whether my being the only person to pick two winning drivers was down to luck or judgement!

Let’s see how that translates into scores..

Points Awarded – Week 15

	Player	F1	WRC	LMS	N-Cup	Week 15
1	Pat W	85	67	199	0	351
2	The Speedgeek	35	35	211	35	316
3	Sebastian	35	67	209	0	311
4	RG	98	107	102	0	307
5	Sean	105	35	125	33	298
6	Startledbunny	149	107	32	1	289
7	Jon Waldock	86	67	102	29	284
8	James	81	32	110	32	255
9	Burwellian	149	0	0	86	235
10	Dank	0	0	0	93	93
11	Jackie	0	0	0	59	59

Self-congratulation isn’t very becoming and is a touch embarrassing! So I will congratulate The Speedgeek, Sebastian and RG for also scoring well.

There were some big variances in the scoring this week as I had thought there might be, and it seems the big difference was in the LMS picks, those of us who leaned toward that series were rewarded. Most of us put Cup on the backburner and that turned out to be a wise decision.

Overall Standings – Week 15

Pos	Pre	+/-	Name	Prior	Wk 15	Total
1	2	1	Pat W	3364	351	3715
2	1	-1	Sebastian	3375	311	3686
3	3	0	The Speedgeek	3315	316	3631
4	4	0	Sean	3281	298	3579
5	5	0	Jon Waldock	3213	284	3497
6	7	1	RG	3179	307	3486
7	6	-1	James	3188	255	3443
8	8	0	Burwellian	2914	235	3149
9	9	0	Startledbunny	2678	289	2967
10	10	0	Jackie	1932	59	1991
11	11	0	Dank	1567	93	1660

I’ve taken a slender lead, from Sebastian who also scored well this week, while The Speedgeek remains in third again with a good weekly score – it would seem the lead battle is distilling down to the three of us, for the moment at least. James and Sean were on a course to catch up later in the season as they’ve been scoring very well for weeks, but this week their progress has been halted temporarily. James actually lost a place to a resurgent RG.

You can see how a week with a variety of events can shake up the scoring, so while things look a little more spread out this week it could easily go back the other way . There are three more weeks with four or more events before the season is out and the next of those is in just two weeks. The variety came from the multiple drivers of the sportscar races though, so I’m sure we’re all looking forward to Laguna Seca next week!

Full results sheets will be available on the TMR drop.io shortly, the Total Driver page on the Data file won’t have been updated but it isn’t essential.

Coming Up – Week 16

This week we have two events to choose from.

Formula 1 – While Red Bull were dominant in Spain, this week’s Monaco GP could be a different matter as the team struggled there last year – is there car advantage enough this year? Will it break again? With the traffic too, qualifying could shake things up let alone the lapping during the race. www.f1.com

NASCAR Cup – Dover this week… going to be honest, I’m clueless on this one. www.nascar.com

I think that’s everything, any questions just ask in the comments, and good luck!