Well, that’s Fort William done and we are straight into preparation for Leogang. *Insert your own London Busses joke here*
Words: Tim Wild Photos: Seb Schieck
Congrats to Greg Minnaar on another win, he sure can still pull it out of the hat and blow everyone away with a run so perfect it was clear the race was won in Fort William with 18 riders left.
My team, Ron Swanson’s Bacon, fared pretty well again. I had a first, second and third within the team and I’m 252/8248 overall. The other two riders… well, let’s just say that they are on thin ice!
It is early, and there isn’t much news in the way of injuries that’ll force me to swap riders out. However, I get the feeling I’m riding my luck a little with my team structure so I thought I’d explore my options.
I’ve gone all–in with my team; Aaron Gwin, Rachel Atherton and Danny Hart cost 950k between them, so that’s 95% of my funds spent on just 60% of my racers. If one of them punctures, crashes or generally phones it in I’m screwed. It’s risky but as Dell Boy will tell you, “who dares wins”. The trouble is I’m daring, but I’m not winning.
So what would I do if I want to slosh the points around the team a bit?
My preferred option would be to replace Aaron (£350k/1460 points) and one of my 25k riders (0 points…) with two solid racers and hope that they both do well. Going by point totals so far and the upcoming races I’d go with Loris Vergier at 200k/555 points and Greg Williamson at 150k/587 points. They’ve both been consistent and they look like they could get on the podium at some point.
The trouble is, combined they don’t have the same points total as Aaron and I could quite reasonably expect a bigger points haul from the remaining races from the series leader.
To really spread the money out and improve on my expected points I’d need more than two transfers and therefore would need to make changes over two rounds. That means I need to have a clear idea now of what I want my team to look like for Lenzerheide in a month’s time.
