TMR Game 2011 – Week 21

Hello and welcome to TMR Game Week 21.

After a busy week we’re back to some semblance of normality this week. This post accepts entries for these 3 events:

– IndyCar Milwaukee
– DTM Lausitz
– NASCAR Cup Michigan

Housekeeping

Each week you pick 10 entries with a maximum of 7 of those coming from a single championship. You can have any mix of races from those listed in this post, and you don’t have to use all of them.

See this page for the game rules.

Email reminders will be sent on Thursdays or Fridays by either myself or Sebastian. Please leave a valid email address in the comment form. If you do not wish to receive reminders please let us know, otherwise we’ll assume we’re okay to send them. Also let us know (privately if you prefer) if you would like to use a different address to the one you use here. I may also use Twitter or other sites if I happen to see you there on Thursday or Friday.

Scores

Wk 20 Le Mans Formula 1 MotoGP NASCAR Cup
Pts Le Mans Montreal Silverstone Pocono
50 #2 Audi Jenson Button Casey Stoner Jeff Gordon
40 #9 Peugeot Sebastian Vettel Andrea Dovizioso Kurt Busch
35 #8 Peugeot Mark Webber Colin Edwards Kyle Busch
32 #7 Peugeot M. Schumacher Nicky Hayden Jimmie Johnson
30 #10 ORECA Vitaly Petrov Alvara Bautista Kevin Harvick
28 #12 Rebellion Felipe Massa Valentino Rossi Dale Jr
26 #22 Kronos Kamui Kobayashi Karel Abraham Juan Montoya
24 #41 Greaves Jaime Alguersuari Toni Elias Matt Kenseth
22 #26 Signatech Rubens Barrichello Hiroshi Aoyama Ryan Newman
20 #33 Level 5 Sebastien Buemi Loris Capirossi Martin Truex Jr
IndyCar IndyCar
Half Pts Texas Race 1 Texas Race 2
25 Dario Franchitti Will Power
20 Scott Dixon Scott Dixon
17.5 (18) Will Power Ryan Briscoe
16 Alex Tagliani Helio Castroneves
15 Takuma Sato Tony Kanaan
14 Ryan Briscoe Marco Andretti
13 EJ Viso Dario Franchitti
12 Vitor Meira Danica Patrick
11 Graham Rahal Ryan Hunter-Reay
10 H. Castroneves EJ Viso

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Scores This Week

Player Le Mans F1 MotoGP NASCAR Cup IndyCar R1 IndyCar R2 Week 20
Ryan – 104 106 – 63 58 331
Startledbunny 40 75 66 33 43 38 295
The Speedgeek 75 81 66 – 34 38 294
Sebastian X 0 104 66 – 59 51 280
Pat W 67 81 90 – 25 13 276
Felipe Gana 67 131 66 11 – – 275
James 35 48 66 43 45 33 270
RubberGoat 157 46 66 – – – 269
Dylanpt24 35 40 81 41 29 26 252
Sean 75 96 66 11 – – 248
Jackie 32 73 107 – – – 212
Maverick 0 54 138 – – – 192
The Crooked Cap 0 54 66 44 – – 164
No Entry: 80% of lowest score
Jay 131
Mike Rice 131

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Congratulations to Ryan who for the second year running proves that avoiding Le Mans picks can bear fruit when the popular runners retire early! The loss of the #1 and #3 Audis really hurt everyone else, but we’d have struggled to beat Ryan even then. The only person to get a decent Le Mans score was RubberGoat who’d pick all the works diesels.

Seems the Stoner/Lorenzo combination was very popular, witness all those with 66pts. F1 was a disappointment for many with Alonso and Hamilton going out. IndyCar netted some useful points for many, whilst Cup only netted a few token picks.

Commiserations to Cap and Maverick who had terrible luck this week! They had identical F1 and LM picks, but Mav’s extra MotoGP selections saved him from the bottom, meaning The Crooked Cap was more like The Wooden Spoon..

Do check the more detailed sheet produced by Sebastian which this week features a great table showing each driver’s scores from the two IndyCar races.

Leaderboard

Pos Pre +/- Name Prior Wk 20 Total +
1 1 0 Sean 4127 248 4375
2 2 0 Sebastian X 4039 280 4319 56
3 3 0 RubberGoat 3903 269 4172 147
4 4 0 Pat W 3867 276 4143 29
5 5 0 Felipe Gana 3850 275 4125 18
6 6 0 The Speedgeek 3764 294 4058 67
7 7 0 Startledbunny 3727 295 4022 36
8 10 2 James 3681 270 3951 71
9 11 2 Dylanpt24 3678 252 3930 21
10 13 3 Ryan 3593 331 3924 6
11 9 -2 Jackie 3686 212 3898 26
12 8 -4 Maverick 3704 192 3896 2
13 12 -1 The Crooked Cap 3658 164 3822 74
14 14 0 Jay 3423 131 3554 268
15 15 0 Mike Rice 2907 131 3038 516

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Sean didn’t have quite such a good week so the lead is cut to 56 points, suddenly it looks like a catchable margin!

It was actually fairly tight in the midfield scoring this week,  ‘Geek and ‘Bunny both made another points gain on the trio ahead of them (that’s Speedgeek’s third consecutive week reeling group I’m in).

No position changes until 8th where all hell broke loose. James and Dylan are up two spots, next up is Ryan who gains 3 places with his big win. These three gain at the expense of Jackie, Mav and Crooked Cap. There are still only 55 points between James and Crooked Cap so that group has a lot of fun ahead of them!

Feel free to point out anything I might have missed here!

Upcoming Races

Three races:

IndyCar – Milwaukee

The great little Milwaukee Mile, the historic track which doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. I love this race.

www.indycar.com

DTM: Lausitz

In a series of fairly boring races this may top them all… I wish they’d convert the cars to oval-spec for one race per year, the infield track isn’t great.

http://www.dtm.com/index.php?lang=en&

NASCAR Cup: Michigan

The season’s first visit to the 2-mile oval.

www.nascar.com

Good luck!

13 thoughts on “TMR Game 2011 – Week 21”

  1. That was a difficult week to do well, and an easy week to do badly.

    It will stink to hell if Power beats Franchitti to the title with the points gained in race two at Texas. I saw a clip of Power looking so jubilant when he drew third for the second grid, which looked very ungracious since he just lucked it, and it makes his first oval win less than valid. I can understand Randy Bernard wanting to pep up the show, but why not make the second race a non-points event, maybe with race one for the points and race two for the prize money, which would avoid the risk of turning the title into a travesty whilst still maintaining the promotional advantage?

    DTM:
    Bruno Spengler
    Gary Paffett
    Timo Scheider
    Jamie Green
    Martin Tomczyk

    Indycar:
    Scott Dixon
    Dario Franchitti
    Ryan Briscoe
    Tony Kanaan

    NASCAR:
    Carl Edwards

    56 points divided by the 24 remaining weeks of this competition is 2.33333333333333…

    Like

  2. What a painful week. I could live with the two Le Mans retirees – there was a certain inevitability that I’d end up picking the early victims and sure enough the #2 won. The loss of 3 bikers on what should have been a straightforward 1-2-3-4-5 is what really hurt.

    IndyCar:
    Scott Dixon
    Dario Franchitti
    Will Power
    Graham Rahal
    Tony Kanaan

    DTM:
    Bruno Spengler
    Martin Tomczyk
    Timo Scheider
    Ralf Schumacher
    Mattias Ekstrom

    Like

  3. Indycar
    Dario Franchitti
    Scott Dixon
    Will Power
    Oriol Servia

    DTM
    Martin Tomczyk
    Bruno Spengler
    Ralf Schumacher

    NASCAR
    Carl Edwards
    Jimmie Johnson
    Dale Earnhardt Jr

    Like

  5. IndyCar
    Dario Franchitti
    Scott Dixon
    Will Power
    Ryan Briscoe
    Tony Kanaan

    NASCAR
    Jimmie Johnson
    Carl Edwards
    Kevin Harvick

    DTM
    Bruno Spengler
    Ralf Schumacher

    Like

  6. Indycar: Will Power, Tony Kanaan, Helio Castroneves, Danica, Alex Tagliani
    NASCAR: Jeff Gordon, Carl Edwards, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, Greg Biffle

    Like

  7. I agree with Sebastian completely about Indy and Texas. Power still hasn’t proven to me he can win on an oval straight up without assistance and his excitement was a little cheesy (although considerably less so than Castroneves and Kanaan when they were doing their little Brazilian metrosexual dance). What shocked me is how predictable it ended up being, and that’s where I got burned last week. I kind of expected the second race to have loads of crashes with the less experienced drivers crashing right in front of front-runners and so on. It SHOCKED the hell out of me that it went caution-free.

    DTM: Kristensen, Spengler, Tomczyk
    IndyCar: Briscoe, Dixon, Franchitti
    Cup: Ky. Busch, Edwards, Johnson, Kenseth

    Michigan’s about as predictable as NASCAR racing can get. I think I’m safe going Cup-heavy this time. Yet again I almost picked David Ragan but chickened out. Somebody might get a sweet deal from him though the way he’s run on cookie-cutters like Texas and Charlotte and considering Michigan might as well be the Roush Motor Speedway…

    Like

  8. Ooh this could be a tough week which may change the standings. I had a 50/50 last week – either my drivers did really well or they didn’t finish at all…

    My picks:

    DTM
    1. Paffett
    2. Spengler
    3. Tomczyk
    4. Scheider

    IndyCar:
    5. Dixon
    6. Franchitti
    7. Kanaan
    8. Power

    NASCAR:
    9. Jimmie Johnson
    10. Kevin Harvick

    Like

  9. Hopefully I can’t do any worse than I did last week, but yiou never know!
    DTM:
    Bruno Spengler
    Timo Scheider
    Martin Tomczyk
    Ralph Schumacher (yes I did say Ralph đŸ˜› )

    Indycar:
    Scott Dixon
    Dario Franchitti
    Will Power

    NASCAR:
    Jimmie Johnson
    Kevin Harvick
    Carl Edwards

    Like

  10. It was senseless to me to have a draw for a championship points race. I think if they keep it next year we’ll be ignoring it for the game, but it looks like Bernard is saying it’ll turn into a reversal of race 1’s finishing order next year. I’m slightly happier about that but to be honest reverse grids should be the preserve of junior open wheel series and touring cars, not in a snobbish way at all, they are just better-suited to those series.
    Race 1 was always going to be about car preservation (see also A1GP), though I agree
    with Sean about expecting a crash-fest in a ‘go for glory’ race 2.
    I only saw the first of the two but the original 550k race format seemed much more interesting, let’s go back to that.

    Seems Milwaukee could be the only unpredictable race this week then.

    DTM: Spengler, Scheider, Tomczyk, Schumacher (Paffett should be a ‘go to’ pick but he’s struggling for points and Ralfie is riding high, let’s see what happens);
    Cup: Edwards, Kenseth, Harvick
    IndyCar: Power (let’s see his first ‘real’ oval win), Franchitti (good everywhere), Wilson (due a decent run);

    Like

  11. Once again I am highly smug after Le Mans… won’t keep it up.

    DTM: Spengler, Tomczyk, Schumacher
    NASCAR: Harvick, Edwards
    IndyCar: Power, Franchitti, Hunter-Reay, Kanaan, Rahal.

    Like

  12. If I could ever commit myself to a keyboard for more than 10 minutes at a stretch, I’d write an 8,000 word post about how the fact that for half points races like the Twin 275s, everybody from 18th on back scores either 6 or 5 points, and so a full field inversion for Race 2 is liable to produce an absolute farce of a “race” in Race 1(everybody outside of the top-10 will be tempted to park first, in order to get pole for Race 2). Also, I think that BTCC has shown us that inverting any number of cars within the top-10 and leaving spots 11 on back the same only produces a subtly different top-10, and no more (any top-6-8-or-10 field inversion would have probably have given us another Ganassi redwash in Race 2 last weekend, anyway). I’ll pass on both of those scenarios. I find it hard to believe this, but I think Curt Cavin’s Trackside segment about it last night talked me back into the random draw for next year…

    Meanwhile, the task at hand:

    IndyCar:
    Scott Dixon
    Ryan Briscoe
    Dario Franchitti
    Tony Kanaan
    Graham Rahal

    DTM:
    Jamie Green
    Bruno Spengler
    Timo Scheider

    NASCAR Cup:
    Matt Kenseth
    Biff Riffle

    Like

  13. Here goes nothing….

    DTM
    Kristensen (sentimental pick)
    Gary Paffett
    Bruno Spengler

    Indycar
    Scott Dixon
    Dario Franchitti
    Marco Andretti
    Ryan Briscoe

    NASCAR
    Carl Edwards
    Jimmie Johnson
    Marcos Ambrose (rolling the dice, yea baby!*)

    *apologies, I don’t know what came over me……

    Like

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