Insider Tips 'n Stats
Alright legends!
It's the business end of the season now that we've passed the halfway point, so we are diving into the facts and figures to provide you with some tips that should hopefully get you shooting up the leaderboard!
Differentials
One way to out-score your fellow competitors is to have riders on your team that the majority of other teams don't own, and crucially, they should be riders scoring points. That way, in the perfect scenario, your riders do well and you overtake everyone else. Easy!
So who are the highest-scoring but least-owned "differential" riders? Well the best are all on in the women's category:
Vali Höll - first up is the women's current number 1 rider, Vali. She has 0% ownership, due to the fact that after doing so well this season (860 pts!) her price tag has been rising each round, and her current value is a massive $1.2 million! You could bring her in... but then you'd only have $800,000 left to spend on the remaining 5 riders you need. If you had her since the start of the season and not sold her, you'd be laughing right now!
Lisa Baumann (580 pts), Gloria Scarsi (500 pts) and Harriet Harnden (490 pts) are the next best, all on only 6% ownership and doing consistently well.
On the opposite end, you might want to avoid some of these highly owned riders: Asa Vermette (63% owned), Max Alran (37%), Finn Iles (34%), Amaury Pierron (30%) and Anna Newkirk (22%).
VALUE FOR MONEY
A good indication a rider is performing better than expected is to look at their value - i.e. scoring the most points per $ spent.
Finn Iles is leading the way here costing only $215k but having finished 1st twice and nabbing a P4 too, netting him 530 total points so far. Asa Vermette, Harriet Harden, Valentina Roa Sanchez and Sacha Ernest follow behind him - with great points to value ratios!
FORM
This one is a bit more subjective... but it could pay off wonders. Riders that are rising in form will probably be gaining a lot of confidence, which could result in them performing well in the next round. Some great examples of this are:
Anna Newkirk: P13, P9, P3 and P1 in the first four rounds. Second fastest in La Thuile practice but a crash in Q1 clearly had an affect and she missed out on Q2. Can she bring that form back into the next round?
Jordan Williams: P27, P3, P22, P6 and a win at the last round - quite a roller coaster of results, but in his own words, he knows that when his confidence is up, he can win races.
Sacha Ernest: P6, P11, P6, P3 - some great results here and looks to be gaining confidence towards the latter half of the season.
Till Alran: P6, P22, P13, P10, P5 - after a strong start, round 2 wasn't so impressive, but he's just been getting better and better since then.
Hopefully that's enough to chew on for now and gives you some good tips to refresh your teams. Don't forget to use your joker card, where you get unlimited transfers for one round!
See you for the next one,
Jon and Tim