Welcome to Week Five. Absolutely no racing that concerns us in the forthcoming weekend, so hold your breath for the NASCAR Daytona 500 the weekend after. I am dreading writing a guide as I barely have a clue myself how to pick for such an unpredicable event. There are four NASCAR restrictor-plate races in a season, but all the others we can avoid picking from at all, never mind being forced to pick seven.

General

Following absolutely no feedback whatsoever, I have decided to scrap nested comments so all replies will now appear in the order they are posted. I will still consider feedback, but I am assuming no one objects.

A reminder that dead-lines are Thursday night/Friday morning, which will be the case all season. The count-down widget does round up on days, but seems to round down on hours (so presumably goes straight from two days to 23 hours).

I have updated the Schedule page with the recently announced Indycar Milwaukee round. There are permanent links to the Schedule and Rules pages at the top of the sidebar.

Scores

Result – Top Ten

Sordo had his engine fail, finishing the last main stage on Friday, but was unable to get back to service. Tänak lost a pile of time on Friday, having elected to only carry one spare tyre, when it turned out that the conditions of limited snow-cover were ripping the studs off, and to have two spares to be able to change both fronts was critical; his engine gave in on Sunday. All the other drivers picked by players finished top-eight. Loeb’s rally was spoilt by a disagreement with a snow-bank on Friday, losing a couple of minutes, and a strong comeback drive was marred by more minor problems.

Player Scores

Non-entries get 160 according to the 90% rule. A heck of a lot of ties, with Tänak lasting longer than Sordo putting Matt and The Speedgeek ahead of Jackie and me. Otherwise, I use the order of when entries were posted to order the columns, but this is not an official tie-break, just an arbituary thing, so we have three joint-winners, plus ties for sixth and eighth.

Trumpet fanfares and a fifty-gun salute are in order for our three joint-winners, Drewe, Pat and Chris, who all achieved the first maximum score ever in the two-and-a-bit year history of this game, so huge congratulations to the three of them. Also, very well done indeed to Maverick for what would normally be a gigantic score for a one-event week, and indeed newcomer, iomracer, who picked the top-six finishers to get fifth on the week.

Seven of us picked Hirvonen/Latvala/Loeb/Østberg/Solberg/Solberg, with the three winners adding Novikov, Maverick choosing Sandell, Matt and The Speedgeek joint-fifth taking Tänak, plus Jackie and I putting our faith in Sordo (rats) for joint-eighth. Novikov puzzles me as his last four WRC results have been two seventh-places and two fifth-places, but before that he was rubbish.

The other three went for different tactics. RubberGoat and Ryan were hit by the poor results of both Tänak and Sordo.

Leaderboard

Patrick’s good year not only continues with a perfect score to add to his tally, but was also a week that saw the two players that had been his nearest rivals, RubberGoat and Ryan, finish second-last and last amongst entered players, thus further extending his lead.

Drewe moves up three to second place with his joint-win. Matt and Jackie both moved up due to the misfortune of others. Maverick’s strong score gains him places. RubberGoat slips by four positions. I gain a place by others doing worse. Ryan drops by five. Chris moves up to the tail of the mid-field having joined in at Week Two. Jay’s absence costs him places, as it does for James, who is over-taken by The Speedgeek and debut player, iomracer.

This Week

No relevent racing this weekend, but do not forget the Daytona 500 the week after. I will try to write a guide, but this will be the most difficult week of the year to pick for. The deadline will be 6 AM GMT on Friday 24th February (1 AM ET) (i.e. late Thursday night). After that will be NASCAR at Phoenix, and then our first chance to pick ten with NASCAR at Las Vegas and WRC in Mexico. Following that, there are only two one-event weeks left in the season, Easter weekend MotoGP and the F1 Brazil GP, and no more weeks off. I am looking forward to Week Thirty-Five when there will be seven events.

Welcome to Week Four. More details below, but the quick version is that the one event this week is the WRC Swedish Rally, so pick seven drivers in a comment on this post before 0600 hrs GMT Friday 10th February (0100 hours ET?). This should be the first reasonably predictable event of the season.

General

It has come to my attention that players are not as aware of the reference pages for this game as I thought. If you look at the top of the side-bar, you will find links to the Schedule and Rules pages. I chose this blog-theme for the width, but unfortunately it does not offer more prominent tabs for fixed pages.

If you have any problems with the way information is displayed on this blog, do let me know. I am thinking of getting rid of nested comments, because with the level of conversation (which is great to see), it is all looking rather messy and confusing. It strikes me that it might be better if all the comments were in chronological order, and “@player-name” or quoting a comment one is responding to could be used if needed. Please let me know what you think on this.

Scores

Week Three had no races for this game, so just a recap of the scores.

Leaderboard

This Week

Roster

· The Sweden Rally (WRC)

The deadline is 0600 hrs GMT Friday 10th February (0100 hours ET?). Beware the countdown-widget rounding up on days remaining. Notable rules to remember are only seven drivers as the maximum for one event, only overall finishing position (not class position) counts, and in WRC events only drivers that complete the event will count for TMRG points. (I have made a clarification to the rules as it struck me that technically both the driver and co-driver count as drivers in WRC, so no picking both from one car! I reckon under the 2010 rules that might have been permissible.)

A reminder that the points system is 50-40-35-32-30-28-26-24-22-20-19-18-17-16-15-14-13-12-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1.

Guide

The Swedish Rally is the second of the two winter WRC events this year. The surface is snow-and-ice covered gravel. Only once in its history has a non-Scandinavian driver won (Loeb in 2004). In 1990, it was cancelled because of mild weather, and in 2005 many stages turned to mud-and-slush unsuitable for the studded tyres used for the event.

Providing the weather is suitably wintry, the event sees drivers often skimming the rear-end of the car on snow-banks when coming out of corners. The danger is they use the wrong snow-bank too aggressively and hit a rock (or maybe find a ditch) they did not know was there. Another feature is after a spin or off, the crew have to sometimes stop on the stage to get out and remove snow from the front-intakes to avoid the engine overheating.

Looking back at recent snow events, it tends to be much the usual names towards the front, but not in quite the usual order. Do have a look at the last three snow-results (two from Sweden and one from Norway), and I think quite a lot of us may be picking much the same drivers. It is difficult to know how the Mini Cooper will do, as it has mostly only shown its form on tarmac (but which Sordo is at his best on), last season and at the Monte Carlo with the lack of snow this year. Whether you want to take a punt on Sébastian Ogier having a brilliant drive in his S2000 Skoda is up to you, but I feel he may crash more often this year for trying to force results, as may have been the case in the Monte. Do note the return of Mads Østberg, who was second in Sweden last year, and sixth in the ‘Championship. Previous winners in Sweden are Hirvonen, Latvala, Loeb and Petter Solberg.

It is not unknown for specialist Scandinavian drivers to be bought in for snow events, but such examples doing very well seems to have become a thing of the past. Swede, Patrik Sandell, will be driving a works Mini Cooper and has a good record on snow in lower classes. Jari Ketomaa, from Finland, has a one-off appearance in a WRC Ford Fiesta, has not competed in the WRC on snow since the 2008 Swedish Rally, but did then finish tenth overall and second in in the PCWRC-class. I would not take any notice of Richard Göransson’s entry in a Mini Cooper as he is a Touring Car driver on a busman’s holiday.

Matthew Wilson will not be competing after dislocating his ankle in training. I think this will make it even more likely that there will be duplicated selections, but sometimes it goes that way. This is the last time this season there will be a WRC stand-alone week.

I do recommend trying to avoid a bad result rather than trying to create a good one, as consistency is the key to this game.

Entry List

2011 Sweden Result

2010 Sweden Result

2009 Norway Result

2011 Championship points-table*

*Link points to a location within a Wikipedia page, so my advice is don’t scroll until the page has loaded, but do re-size the window as it is loading.

Welcome to Week Three. There are no events this week so this post will just update the scores after the Rolex 24 at Daytona. I will do a Week Four post in about a week’s time for your selections from The Swedish Rally. This will be the first event this season with fairly obvious choices. Then it is another week off before the dreaded Daytona 500, which surely will be the most difficult to predict week of the year.

Scores

Result – Top Ten

Ten of the fourteen Daytona Prototypes finished ahead of the GTs. The Suntrust car went out in very last place with engine woes. The GAINSCO and Krohn cars both finished well back amongst the GTs. The #02 Ganassi had an early problem with the gear-selector and could not quite make it back up to the lead lap during the race. The #01 Ganassi in the later hours had clutch-and-gearbox gremlins that saw it fall out of contention. There was a fierce battle for the lead between A.J. Allmendinger in the #60 MSR and Alan McNish in the #8 Starworks in the last third of the race, but by the last stints the #60 had the upper hand to take the win. The #6 MSR had a quiet race to be third and the last car on the lead lap.

Player Scores

Non-entrants score 135 by the 90% rule.

Congratulations to RubberGoat for a tidy win. You may recall his selection method was to pick the first seven on the entry-list. This meant he missed the winner, but had all his choices finish in the top-nine, being the only player to avoid the zero-score of the normally trustworthy Suntrust car. As with Week One, avoiding the bad scores, or not, primarily ordered the player-results.

Jay, Matt and Drewe all did well to break 200 which is by no means easy with this race. Pat and Ryan backed up their one-two last week with solid scores. (Jay and Matt made identical picks, and finished joint-second as no tie-breaker applies, but I use who posted first for column order.)

Leaderboard

Patrick is pulling away from the field. Gavin’s win sees him jump six places to second displacing Ryan. New players, Matt and Drewe fill out the top-five moving up two each. Jay moves up five, with the Birmingham contingent all dropping four places (bugger). Chris enters the competition with a gain of two places. Unfortunately, James missed his entry but stays just ahead of The Speedgeek.

Things are just warming up with the early weeks involving a lot of lucky-dip events. Previous players will know once the main season gets going that more difficult-to-predict events can be avoided. I will put up the competition-post for Week Four and The Swedish Rally in a few days around about Sunday/Monday, so do not forget next week to remember your entry, or indeed get it in on this post. I have already written a guide for the event that can be found here. (I have already done my selection, but now I am running the game it seems polite to let others have more time to post their entries first.)

Welcome to Week Two. Just the Rolex 24 At Daytona this week. More information is below the scores, but the short version is pick seven car-entries and post them in the comments before 6 AM GMT on Friday 27th January (1 AM ET).

With plugs on Too Much Racing, Viva F1, and Sidepodcast (thanks to Pat, Jackie, SPC, and players that did any plugs on social media), I am disappointed with only eleven players. I am hoping to pick up some new entrants for this week. If those of you that have not already done so can help out with a blog hat-tip (a couple of lines and a link would be great) or a social-media mention, that would be very appreciated. Sorry to ask but I think we could use a few more players.

Scores

Result – Top Ten

(I can not get the page and table fonts to match in size.)

Player Scores

Non-entries get 155 according to the one-off 99% rule (for the rest of the year, it will be 90% of the lowest full-entry score).

Very well done indeed to Pat for dodging all the bullets (I think he might have been hiding behind Andy) to get a very strong win. Good scores also from Ryan and the three Birmingham-based players. Some players were unfortunately hit by more than one of the retirements of Latvala, Neuville, and Ogier. The Speedgeek starts this season, as he did last year, with rotten luck.

Leaderboard

Patrick leaps to the top of the leaderboard. Concerning the equal scores of Jay and James, I applied rule 7a to separate them in the week’s scores (as Ogier retired later than Neuville albeit both for zero points), and rule 7c for the leaderboard (on the grounds Jay’s best weekly finishing position is higher than James’s). Reading my own rules, whilst WRC drivers do not score if they do not finish, it seems their position in the order of retirements does still count for tie-breakers; I do hope I have not made a rod for my own back.

This Week

Event Roster

Again just the one.

· Rolex 24 At Daytona

The deadline is 6 AM GMT on Friday 27th January (1 AM ET I believe). The timing widget in the sidebar should indicate how many hours to go when less than twenty-four. I am expecting to stick to this cut-off day-and-time for the rest of the season. It is a day earlier than we used last year. Especial rules to remember are that overall race positions count, not class results, pick seven as that is the maximum for one event, and being a sports-car race, pick car-entries not drivers.

Please be careful with entries as for example there is a #02 and a #2 car. Ideally, “01 Ganassi”, is the syntax prefered for all choices, as it makes it easier for doing the scoring, and for other players to see whom you have picked. (I am quite bossy.)

Guide

The Rolex 24 At Daytona is the opening round, and only round included in this game, of the Grand-Am series. There are two classes, the faster ‘Daytona Prototype’ cars, and the slower GT cars.

The Rolex 24 has a reputation as a car-breaker, and the general rule of thumb is that the final result is headed by the Prototype cars that avoid any major reliability issues, followed by a horde of GT cars. Last year, this leading group of Prototype cars was larger than usual, filling the top-eleven places. The 2010 race it was seven prototypes at the front, and the year before that eight.

It will be an adventurous player that does not pick the two Ganassi cars. The team run one car in other Grand-Am events and won the series-title as per usual last season. They expand to two cars for this race, filling out the line-up with their Indycar and NASCAR star-drivers. They finished one-two last year at Daytona, and in the last three years have five top-five finishes from six starts. The next best in terms of consistency of reasonably good results is single-car team Suntrust, that have finished fourth, sixth and fifth in the last three years, plus also making a closer fight of it with Ganassi than expected for last season’s Grand-Am title.

That information infers what a reliability-jumble this race is. My advice is pick the Prototype cars you have the most faith in to finish anywhere near the front-end, and hope for luck. You might want to go wild and dip into GT, but that class is also subject to the vagaries of this event, so trying to pick a car or cars likely enough to get top places behind the leading prototypes would be a difficult call.

Entry List

2011 Rolex 24 Results

2010 Rolex 24 Results

2009 Rolex 24 Results

2011 Grand-Am Prototype Series Points-Table

2011 Grand-Am GT Series Points-Table

(** I am afraid newcomers have missed the first week cut-off but there is a higher-than-usual minimum-points allowance for Week One, so please join us for Week Two. The entry-post should be up around Monday and I will e-mail you a reminder the day before the deadline if you leave a comment **)

Introduction

The competition kicks off with the Monte Carlo Rally. Pick seven drivers (the maximum for one event) and leave them in the comments. Future weekly posts will include score-tables for the previous weekend and overall standings but obviously not this one. Do consider the points regime here in the rules, and bear in mind avoiding bad results across the season is as important if not more important than getting good ones. Beware the early deadline. I will normally (if I remember) send out reminder e-mails to regular players still to enter for the week on deadline day, but obviously I do not yet know who you will be. Thus I will try to do this for last year’s players plus any new ones I am aware of, so if you are planning to play but do not have your entry ready, leave a comment. There is a special offer on minimum score this week, 99% of the lowest full entry instead of the usual 90%, so it is not as bad as it could be to miss this week, but try not to.

It is very easy to put off entering until the last evening, and then just to forget. Sometimes in a busy week I used to put in a placeholder entry that I spent a couple of minutes on, knowing I could change it later when I had more time, but at least I would have an entry if I forgot.

If you do amend your entry, I would prefer you provide another full list, copy-and-paste the original and amend it, rather than just tell me about which driver(s) you are dropping and replacing with whom. It is easiest for me if your last entry-comment has all the line-up rather than having to extract the information from the amendment-comment and the previous entry. I will still accept the change otherwise, but cooperation on this would be appreciated. The last entry made before the deadline will be accepted.

The rules and schedule pages can be found at the top of the sidebar.

Monte Carlo Rally

Because the first Super-Specials are on Wednesday, the deadline will be extra early, being 0600 hrs GMT on Wednesday 18th January (about midnight Tuesday night ET). Two particular rules to note. Overall results only count, not class-position. Also, because it is such a pain to go back through stage-results to perhaps establish a retired car did finish with a point or two, the rule for WRC is if they do not finish they do not score.

The official entry-list is on this page, it being necessary to click the “Engagés 2012″ tab. However, below is the main part of the entry-list including all the WRC-class entries and Ogier in the S2000-class. I would imagine most would pick from these. I have no idea why Dani Sordo is down as Daniel Sordo Castillo.

Guide

All the early game-weeks including this one are difficult to call, with two WRC winter-rounds, the car-breaking Rolex 24 of Daytona, and two NASCAR-only weekends. A big part of my strategy for this period will be crossing my fingers that nothing too bad happens.

This event is tricky as the last tarmac/snow WRC event was the 2008 Monte Carlo Rally. That was won by Sebastian Loeb (who has won every tarmac event going back for years, except for an engine failure last year in France) over Mikko Hirvonen. The spectators at this event have been known to move snow onto the road to make things more exciting.

Hirvonen has moved from Ford to Citroën. Sébastien Ogier will be driving a Skoda in a lower class having signed to join the VW WRC team planned for 2013, so his strong results last season would be best ignored. This year, Mini, run by Prodrive, have become a full-time manufacturer team; Dani Sordo was very competitive on tarmac events in the car. Ex-World Champion, Petter Solberg after some years as a privateer has been promoted to a works drive with Ford. Mathew Wilson has gone the opposite direction now in a self-entered Ford after being dropped by the M-Sport team his father runs – I wonder if that made for a happy family Christmas?

I think just picking the top runners with the top teams from last year (but probably not Ogier), then filling out with drivers that look safe to usually deliver a reasonable result, perhaps leaning towards tarmac results from last year, is about the best approach. After the obvious choices, this will be a stab in the dark for all of us.

The dark horse might be François Delecour, who has been given a one-off top drive by Ford. I presume they have a good reason for doing this, but it may be to do with his being French. He had a bit of WRC success in his time, won the Monte Carlo in 1994, and finished fifth last year under IRC rules. The other wildcard might be Ogier, surely favourite to win the secondary class, but if he does how high that will put him in the overall standings is questionable.

2008 Standing Monte Carlo result in left-column.

2011 Monte Carlo result Run as IRC event.

2011 Standing Germany, France and Spain were tarmac events.

Welcome one and all to The Motor Racing Game, a direct replacement for the superb Too Much Racing Game that Patrick Wotton has been running
the past two seasons on his Too Much Racing blog. This in turn was based on Andy The Speedgeek’s All-Racing Fantasy League, which is a more complicated e-mail based competition. Thank you for the support from both for my decision to take over TMRG this season, following Patrick’s decision to concentrate on other projects.

I have to admit upfront two reasons for deciding to take over the game. Firstly, I would miss it lots if it ceased to exist, and secondly, I won it both times and want to go for the hat-trick.

Anyone feeling a bit intimidated by the range of racing involved, do not worry as I will try to provide useful links as needed. Looking up a few previous results on Wikipedia can provide fast expertise in my experience. A great benefit of playing this game is the way in which players find themselves engaging with motor-racing series they previously had not found an interest in.

The Rules

The game covers a multitude of events provisionally including Formula One, NASCAR, World Rally Championship, Indycar, MotoGP, DTM, World Endurance Championship, American Le Mans Series, and the Rolex 24 At Daytona. Each week, competitors are allowed to pick ten drivers (or car-entries in sports-car events) with a maximum of seven from any one event taking place that weekend. This means in one-event weekends, only seven can be picked; if two or more events, players can choose how to split their ten picks between races (subject to the seven-per-event restriction), and in multi-event weeks, it is not required to pick from all events.

Each selection will be scored according to where they finish (or retire) in the official results for their event using this scoring system:

50-40-35-32-30-28-26-24-22-20-19-18-17-16-15-14-13-12-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-2-2

for the top-thirty positions with one point for positions thirty-first to forty-third. Retirements and unclassified finishers will count for position under game rules, but not non-starters or disqualifications. Obviously, scores will be added up every week to give a weekly winner, and added up across the season to establish the overall winner. There will be a weekly post updating the scores and informing players of the upcoming weekend’s events, with players submitting their selections via the comments.

The deadline for entries will be six o’clock Friday mornings, which should be about midnight ET. Players can change their entries up until the deadline. E-mail reminders (if I remember) will be issued to late-comers on Thursday. Anyone missing making their entry on time will be given 90% of the lowest score for a full entry that week. For the first event (Monte Carlo Rally), I plan to increase this to 99% to encourage late-comers, with a ‘shadow’ starting-score available to newbies. If anyone misses too many consecutive weeks, I will stop scoring them.

The ultimate winner will be heartily congratulated and awarded any prize they wish for, provided they arrange and pay for it themselves.

See the pages at the top of the side-bar for full rules and the schedule.

Housekeeping

For those that played last year, you will notice that the LMS has been dropped for the World Endurance Championship that supersedes the ILMC. This is because the ELMS, as it will be known this year, will no longer have an LMP1 class. Combined with ALMS and the Rolex 24, this should give us about seventeen sports-car events which seems about right.

I was very keen to see WRC return, and believed the best way to do this is to move the entry deadline forward twenty-four hours. I felt this had the added benefit that those of us more attentive over Friday practice-times and news would not gain the advantage, or indeed need to worry about it (yours truly being most likely in the past to make late-changes, including once after MotoGP qualification seconds before the cut-off). I get the impression that players often put off their entry until Friday evening because they could, and will do it on Thursday evening if they have to.

While I agree with Patrick and Andy that ACO rules, such as at the Le Mans 24 Hours, whereby cars only count for classification if still running at the end, even over cars that have managed greater distances but broken down, is a stupid rule, I have however decided I will score such decisions by ACO official results to make scoring more straightforward. Last year, deciding to do it on distance led to Patrick and I having both to correct totals when we remembered a bit late.

With these matters, also the plan to increase the minimum-points percentages as detailed, and anything else that occurs, could commenters please be kind enough to give feedback? Also, if you have a blog, would you consider giving this competition a plug please?

Monte Carlo Rally

I will put up an entry post with useful links for this event on around Sunday, but feel free to put in an entry on this post (remember you can change it later if you want). Because the first Super-Specials are on Wednesday, the deadline will be extra early, being 0600 hrs GMT on Wednesday 18th January (about midnight Tuesday night ET). Two particular rules to note. Overall results only count, not class-position. Also, because it is such a pain to go back through stage-results to perhaps establish a retired car did finish with a point or two, the rule for WRC is if they do not finish they do not score. The official entry-list is on this page, it being necessary to click the “Engagés 2012″ tab.