oh you devious little angels
Apr. 26th, 2008 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
was_tansu_now_badhedgehog Right, so, this morning Sébastien Loeb took the lead and looked to be in a position to run away with it, until he hit Conrad Rautenbach head on, on the way from stage 11 (Conrad was on his way to the stage). So with Seb out of the picture for the rest of the day the lead was tight between Dani Sordo (Citroen), Jari-Matti Latvala (Ford) and Mikko Hirvonen (Ford).
All three wanted to be in amongst it, but none of them wanted to be in the lead at the end of the day, because the leader starts first and therefore goes out on loose gravel which doesn't give the best times. Better to go out after someone else has swept the road for you. There is a stage tomorrow that is very long and will be very loose first thing, making it particularly undesirable to go first.
So, through the afternoon stages, each tried to be fast, fast enough to be up there in it, but not fast enough to take and keep overall lead of the rally. Sordo tried to back off little by little through each stage, but the Ford team mates had a better strategy - to ease right back on the very last bit of the very last stage. This they did, putting them both 20 seconds back for the stage, and giving Sordo an 8 second lead. You can see on the split times for the last stage that Latvala was the fastest through the second and third splits.
Little bits of strategy like this tickle me immensely.(even though they are terribly simple and not really worth the comment - it's hardly like I'm discussing chess or the behavioural economics of public transport pricing policies)
All three wanted to be in amongst it, but none of them wanted to be in the lead at the end of the day, because the leader starts first and therefore goes out on loose gravel which doesn't give the best times. Better to go out after someone else has swept the road for you. There is a stage tomorrow that is very long and will be very loose first thing, making it particularly undesirable to go first.
So, through the afternoon stages, each tried to be fast, fast enough to be up there in it, but not fast enough to take and keep overall lead of the rally. Sordo tried to back off little by little through each stage, but the Ford team mates had a better strategy - to ease right back on the very last bit of the very last stage. This they did, putting them both 20 seconds back for the stage, and giving Sordo an 8 second lead. You can see on the split times for the last stage that Latvala was the fastest through the second and third splits.
Little bits of strategy like this tickle me immensely.(even though they are terribly simple and not really worth the comment - it's hardly like I'm discussing chess or the behavioural economics of public transport pricing policies)
