Welcome to Week 21 of the Too Much Racing Game!
[picapp align=”right” wrap=”false” link=”term=Le+Mans&iid=9115543″ src=”http://view2.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/9115543/motorsports-2010-mans/motorsports-2010-mans.jpg?size=500&imageId=9115543″ width=”380″ height=”253″ /]
What a week of sport! Starting with Le Mans qualifying, through the race itself and the World Cup opening games to the Canadian GP, it felt like it was non-stop. I hope you enjoyed it too, and you can read some of my thoughts of the weekend in my recap.
Quick-Start
Racing this week:
IndyCar – Iowa (oval);
Sprint Cup – Sonoma (road course);
Usual restrictions apply, pick up to 10 drivers, no more than 7 from one race. Note that the Cup race is on a road course and some of the drivers have changed – more on that later.
The cutoff is Saturday 19th June at 4.59am BST (British Summer Time = GMT+1), that’s 11.59pm Friday night US EDT.
For the full results from Week 20, read on.
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. 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 20
| Week 20 | F1 | NASCAR Cup | |
| Points | Canadian GP | Michigan | |
| 1 | 50 | Lewis Hamilton | Denny Hamlin |
| 2 | 40 | Jenson Button | Kasey Kahne |
| 3 | 35 | Fernando Alonso | Kurt Busch |
| 4 | 32 | Sebastian Vettel | Jeff Gordon |
| 5 | 30 | Mark Webber | Tony Stewart |
| 6 | 28 | Nico Rosberg | Jimmie Johnson |
| 7 | 26 | Robert Kubica | Dale Earnhardt Jr |
| 8 | 24 | Sebastien Buemi | Jeff Burton |
| 9 | 22 | Vitantonio Liuzzi | Greg Biffle |
| 10 | 20 | Adrian Sutil | Joey Logano |
| Points | 24 Hours of Le Mans | ||
| 1 | 50 | Rockenfeller / Bernhard / Dumas | |
| 2 | 40 | Lotterer / Fässler / Tréluyer | |
| 3 | 35 | Kristensen / McNish / Capello | |
| 4 | 32 | Ayari / Andre / Meyrick | |
| 5 | 30 | Leventis / Watts / Kane | |
| 6 | 28 | Primat / Mücke / Fernández | |
| 7 | 26 | Lahaye / Moreau / Charouz | |
| 8 | 24 | Newton / Erdos / Wallace | |
| 9 | 22 | Nicolet / Hein / Yvon | |
| 10 | 20 | Greaves / Ojjeh / Chalandon | |
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That Peugeot collapse was unexpected, wasn’t it! Audi take the 1-2-3 sweep at Le Mans. It was a great Canadian GP, too.
Note that I have scored Le Mans per this Wikipedia article. The 24 Hours is unique in that it removes non-finishers from the results, to my knowledge all other major events bar WRC retain them in the classification. For the purposes of scoring, the 28 finishers are scored first and then retirees are lined up behind them with those completing the furthest distance coming first. This is in line with the original ARFL game upon which this game is based (I’m sure Andy The Speedgeek can verify this).
Points Awarded – Week 20
| Player | Le Mans | F1 | N-Cup | Week 20 |
| RG | 0 | 226 | 113 | 339 |
| Burwellian | 0 | 172 | 109 | 281 |
| Startledbunny | 77 | 152 | 44 | 273 |
| Jon Waldock | 38 | 171 | 0 | 209 |
| Jackie | 38 | 136 | 0 | 174 |
| Pat W | 40 | 120 | 0 | 160 |
| Sebastian | 39 | 102 | 0 | 141 |
| Dank | 0 | 0 | 140 | 140 |
| Sean | 3 | 62 | 60 | 125 |
| The Speedgeek | 4 | 118 | 0 | 122 |
| James | 12 | 0 | 0 | 12 |
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Congratulations RG! Completely wiped the floor with most of us with his risky strategy of ignoring Le Mans completely. It was a gamble, had the Peugeots finished on the podium the rest of us would’ve scored highly.
The other exceptions Burwellian (carryover entry with F1 and NASCAR only), and Dank (carryover entry, NASCAR only). Burwellian’s carryover picks happened to have a high score compared to usual and with the rest of us being so poor it maximised it.
Startledbunny’s choice of two Audi and two Peugeot drivers meant he was the only one to have two top ten finishers in his Le Mans picks, in addition to a strong F1 line-up. Jon had a good F1 result too.
That’s not a typo for James, he did get twelve from his carryover entry, those were ALMS drivers who came over for the 24 Hours but finished well down the order.
Oh what might have been…
Overall Standings – Week 20
| Pos | Pre | +/- | Name | Prior | Wk 20 | Total | Gap | |
| 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Sebastian | 4962 | 141 | 5103 | 0 |
| 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | Pat W | 4828 | 160 | 4988 | 115 |
| 3 | 3 | 5 | 2 | RG | 4611 | 339 | 4950 | 153 |
| 4 | 4 | 3 | -1 | The Speedgeek | 4793 | 122 | 4915 | 188 |
| 5 | 5 | 4 | -1 | Sean | 4722 | 125 | 4847 | 256 |
| 6 | 6 | 6 | 0 | Jon Waldock | 4560 | 209 | 4769 | 334 |
| 7 | 7 | 8 | 1 | Startledbunny | 4114 | 273 | 4387 | 716 |
| 8 | 8 | 7 | -1 | James | 4180 | 12 | 4192 | 911 |
| 9 | 9 | 9 | 0 | Burwellian | 3730 | 281 | 4011 | 1092 |
| 10 | 10 | 10 | 0 | Jackie | 3049 | 174 | 3223 | 1880 |
| 11 | 11 | 11 | 0 | Dank | 2016 | 140 | 2156 | 2947 |
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RG’s massive points advantage claims him two positions, ahead of Speedgeek and Sean who seem to be about to engage in their own battle. I’ve closed in very slightly on leader Sebastian who’s the first to pass the 5000 barrier.
Startledbunny jumps ahead of James and Burwellian reclaims a chunk of the points gap.
When I said Le Mans would mix things up, I never thought it would be so one-sided! I don’t think anyone could’ve forseen every single Peugeot retiring.
Results sheets are available on the TMR drop.io.
Coming Up – Week 21
This week we have two events:
IZOD IndyCar Series – The short but fast Iowa Speedway which some describe as a small superspeedway, it is so fast. Ganassi are the team to beat on ovals, you can expect Penske to run them close and now Andretti Autosport seem to be recovering their old form. The good news is Ryan Hunter-Reay has been confirmed to continue for another race, and Graham Rahal has taken over Mike Conway’s car in place of temporary stand-in Tomas Scheckter. Check the entry list at indycar.com.
Sprint Cup – The first of two road courses on the Sprint Cup schedule, this is on the shorter version of the Infineon Raceway course at Sears Point, Sonoma, California. Please note that a few of the middle/lower order teams have substituted their regular drivers for ‘road course specialists’ including Jan Magnussen and in a surprise move, Mattias Ekstrom (via his Red Bull links) who you’ll be familiar with from your DTM picks. Now don’t say this game never does anything for you.. Go to nascar.com for more info.
I think that’s everything, any questions just ask in the comments.
[Photo: Audi vs Peugeot, (c) ZumaPress via Picapp]
I Watch Too Much Racing 
Pat,
Actually, I scored ARFL this week on laps completed, like every other freaking motor race in the world (not mad at you, I’m mad at the French). I don’t understand why the ACO has to be so stubborn about this. In fact, I’ve always heard David Hobbs tell stories about how his car expired on the last lap of the race one year, and how that meant that they weren’t classified even though they should have been 3rd or 4rd (or whatever), and thankfully that isn’t what happens anymore by the rules…so given all of that, I was surprised to pull up the official results from lemans.org to find that that’s how the race is still scored. Seems BS to me. The ORECA Pug runs more laps than every non-Audi and winds up 29th? The Highcroft car loses like 2-3 hours in the pits, rolls out for the last lap and winds up in front of two Peugeots, two Aston Lolas, and one Kolles Audi? Hmmm.
This is not meant as a slap at you by any means. Feel free to score the race however you like, but I’m just not a fan of the way the ACO does business. I can send you my master spreadsheet tonight, if you’d like to copy off of my sheet for this week’s scores… 🙂
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Uh, oh.
Just read your and Sebastian’s comments on the thread from last week and took a look at last year’s ARFL spreadsheet. I did score the race off of Wikipedia, which was something of a mistake in my opinion, but looking deeper, the only car that didn’t finish that would have come out considerably better in my “new” system would have been the Team Goh Porsche, which completed enough laps for 15th (was classified 34th in the results). Chris Dyson’s car actually only completed the 35th most laps, so he’d still have scored a single point. The #64 Vette should have been (in my “new” system) 29th instead of 35th, so those guys actually got shorted one point. Several guys who had ARFL implications (Berhard, Dumas, Melo, Kaffer, Salo, Krohn, Jonsson, Bouchut) got overscored by a point, as they’d have finished behind the Goh Porsche.
I don’t know if this would have had any implications on the free agent acquisitions over the second half of the season (somebody lower or higher than they should have been in the season standings), but I kind of doubt it (teams generally weren’t within 3-4 points of each other). Thankfully, the gaps between teams at the end of the season were far bigger than 3-4 points, so it looks like exceedingly lucky there.
Bottom line: late race retirements had a far bigger effect on the results this year than last. I don’t know where this leaves you, but I’m going to leave the ARFL scoring where it is for this year, with cars and drivers scored off of laps completed.
Extra bottom line: stupid frogs. Curse you, your fries, your bread and your toast.
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Noted. I meant to ask you before the race but I ran out of time, so I just had to go with something.
I’ll have a think about what to do..
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Hell, computer went bang. At internet cafe.
Indycar:
Dixon
Franchitti
Briscoe
Castroneves
Patrick
Kanaan
NASCAR:
Jeff Gordon
Tony Stewart
Kyle Busch
Montoya
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I think it’ll be easier to leave it as is. While F1, IndyCar, NASCAR and everything else scores DNFs according to how many laps completed, the 24hr does not and I’d like for the game to attempt to resemble the actual series. But I also think it is stupid to completely remove all DNFs from the results so they are added at the bottom.
I say this noting I want to double-check the WRC results on the FIA website.
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Yeah. I knew Le Mans is and always has been scored with retirements not classified and below all finishers. (I’d have to edit a lot of stuff on my site to fix that if they retconned it and scored it like any other series.) Technically F1 is too but they fixed that by counting all finishers below 90% of the winner’s distance as not classified and all retirements at 90% or greater of the winner’s distance as classified, which I also find kind of bizarre.
Anyway…
IndyCar:
Ryan Briscoe
Hélio Castroneves
Scott Dixon
Dario Franchitti
Dan Wheldon (he’s great here, even for Panther)
Cup:
Marcos Ambrose
Kurt Busch
Kyle Busch
Juan Pablo Montoya
Tony Stewart
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Well, can’t get better than last week, but I’ll try…
IndyCar: Ryan Briscoe, Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Danica Patrick, Justin Wilson
NASCAR: Kyle Busch, Kurt Busch, Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon
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Before I forget again…
IndyCar:
Ryan Briscoe
Dario Franchitti
Tony Kanaan
Will Power
Marco Andretti
Scott Dixon
NASCAR Cup:
Kyle Busch
Kevin Harvick
Juan Pablo Montoya
Jeff Gordon
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There was a scoring error affecting RG and Sean. They each picked a Busch brother, but I scored them the wrong way so I gave Kurt’s points for Kyle and vice versa. This means RG gains another 25 points and Sean loses 25 points, and I have updated the tables above (but not the drop.io files). Sorry.
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IndyCar
Scott Dixon
Dario Franchitti
Helio Castroneves
Will Power
Marco Andretti (banking on AA’s oval run continuing)
Cup
Juan Montoya
Jeff Gordon
Kevin Harvick
Jimmie Johnson
Kyle Busch
I like Mattias Ekstrom and I love that Red Bull are taking a chance on bringing him in, and it would be fantastic if he scored a top 3… but I think it unlikely and can’t risk it.
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IRL
Dario Franchitti
Will Power
Scott Dixon
Helio Castroneves
Ryan Briscoe
Nascar
Kevin Harvick
Kyle Busch
Denny Hamlin
Kurt Busch
Jimmie Johnson
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Indycar
Dario Franchitti
Scott Dixon
Ryan Briscoe
Will Power
Helio Castroneves
NASCAR
Kyle Busch
Denny Hamlin
Matt Kenseth
Juan Montoya
Jimmie Johnson
Went for Montoya because I know he can turn both left and right.
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Just back for pride!!
Indycar
Helio Castroneve
Dario Franchitti
Ryan Briscoe
Scott Dixon
NASCAR
Marcos Ambrose
Juan Montoya
Tony Stewart
Jeff Gordon
Kyle Busch
Robby Gordon
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Too late to do this this year but if next year you warn people in advance of making their picks, then why not do it on distance even if a car is officially declassified?
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