Oh dear, another completely awful performance this year... No clue why.
I played this exact race many times to find out how TTTs work this year, and both Setiawa and Chapulin always ended up up front on S3, the latter often even fighting for the top spots - but now when it really counted they didn't care at all. Not the first time this happens this year, guess my own PCM version just likes my team far more than anyone else's ^^
TTT was fine (I guess we actually were even 4th in the official results, and not 5th as in the export which is often wrong in TTTs), but I guess we'll definitely have to send Schmid the next time - after all, looking at who survived S3, stamina seemed to have zero importance here... bad planning ^^
Congrats to knockout on the win - not that surprising to see you win a hilly race, but the winner's name sure is surprising ^^
Also, weird team tactics by EA, Wirtgen should have been easily in the front group yesterday - but to be fair, I think he didn't win the race one single time in all my test runs, this game is just completely awful in hilly stage races.
Last but not least, great to see Bissegger lead Simba to a rather surprising stage win, hopefully he can do the same for us next year
I had hoped that the combination of the hills and short TTT might work in our favour heading into this race. However in my mind that was based around Errazkin making the front group on the hilly stages and then taking advantage of being one of the few puncheurs not to be dropped in the TTT.
Obviously things didn't go to plan in that sense, but with Peak pulling off an amazing performance to take 2nd and Mansouri adding the top 10 that was our original target as well it makes this a really good race for us. Unfortunately it was also a really good race for Lotto and Zalgiris so didn't help us that much in the promotion race, but should get us to 30 PpRD this month so can't complain
Congrats to knockout and thanks for the reports Abhi!
