2015 Week 34

Welcome to week 34 – three races this weekend. WRC is in Australia; Moto GP is at Misano in Italy; NASCAR has their final race before the “Chase” at the short track of Richmond in Virginia. Picks can be made at: http://www.roadracetracks.com/motorracinggame.shtml.

Scores from week 33:

F1 Italy, NASCAR Darlington:

Lewis Hamilton won his 40^th race as an F1 driver by winning in Monza, Italy, and he led from start to finish. There was initially some puzzle at the end when he was instructed by Mercedes to run as hard as possible, which he duly did, and so won by 25s. It then turned out that he started with under-inflated tires, possibly in violation of the rules, hence Mercedes fear he’d get a time penalty, and so should finish with as big a margin as possible. But in the end no penalty was incurred. His rival for the championship, teammate Nico Rosberg blew his engine with a few laps to go, so finished classified 17^th. Sebastian Vettel was ahead of Rosberg at the time, so took a deserved second. Felipe Massa took the final podium spot. Kimi Raikkonen finished an impressive fourth, considering that he stalled his car at the start, and so had to recover from the back of the field. Sergio Perez in the Force India Mercedes also did a good job with a fifth place finish, and the only other driver to finish on the same lap as Hamilton. A lap behind, Nico Hulkenberg was the best of the rest, finishing 7^th ahead of Daniel Ricciardo, Marcus Ericsson, and Daniil Kvyat.

There were lots of wrecks at the NASCAR race at Darlington, but most were solo-car spins, and none were big wrecks. But it did make it a stop-and-start kind of race. Carl Edwards had the best car at the end, driving to a fairly easy win in the closing laps, after the final caution left eight laps to go under green. We had quite a wide variety of picks, but similar to the last time we were forced to pick NASCAR drivers, we were unexpectedly successful with Brad Keselowski 2^nd, Deny Hamlin 3^rd, Joey Logano 4^th, Kevin Harvick 5^th, and Kyle Busch 7^th (behind brother Kurt). Only Jimmie Johnson in 19^th and Matt Kenseth in 21^st failed to deliver, with the former having a spin from which he didn’t recover, and the latter actually recovering from hitting the wall early in the race.

Congratulations to Drewe and his fourth win of the year, and in dominant fashion – by a 30 point margin. Clearly it was his NASCAR picks of Edwards and Keselowki that made the difference. No change in the standings, but Greased Lightning’s hold on third gets cut significantly. I failed to note last week, but with Indycar finishing their season, congratulations to Greased Lightning who was the season-long winner of picking drivers from that series. Current standings …