Hello from windy Coober Pedy!
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| Teams forming walls to shelter their cars from the wind in the Coober Pedy control stop |
A brief update from Day 4: Great sun today, but worse headwinds than yesterday. The top five spots in the Challenger class seem pretty locked in and the leaders will finish early tomorrow. The Cruiser class is... a bit of a mess.
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| Chart via Scientific Gems |
In the Challenger class, Innoptus remains in the lead and ended the day well south of Port Augusta. Twente managed to close the gap from 27 minutes at Erldunda yesterday, to 16 minutes at Coober Pedy early today, and 14 minutes at Glendambo afterward... but the gap had once again widened to 30 minutes again at Port Augusta and appeared largely unchanged through the remainder of the day. Barring an extended breakdown, it seems extremely unlikely that Twente will be able to take the lead now that both teams are deep into the area approaching Adelaide where traffic is heavier and overtaking is increasingly difficult.
Two hours behind the battle for the lead, Brunel remains ahead of Michigan. Michgian made up 13 minutes between Erldunda and Coober Pedy, and another 7 minutes between Coober Pedy and Glendambo, but are still a hair over an hour behind Brunel. Again, barring breakdowns, these two seem fairly fixed in position.
In 5th place is Sonnenwagen, about 45 minutes behind Michigan as of the Glendambo control stop and hours ahead of Tokai. Tokai was briefly in 5th place, having finally passed Sonnenwagen yesterday after a long chase, when they were stopped for about two hours early today due to suspension issues. Tokai fell back to 7th behind Top Dutch before getting back on the road, but they were able to regain 6th place soon after Coober Pedy.
About an hour and a half behind Top Dutch, JU is currently edging out Kogakuin and Durham in a 3-way battle for 8th place. This is a very tightly contested spot to watch tomorrow and into early Friday!
Eclipse is fairly firmly in 11th place with over an hour of space ahead and behind them as of the Erldunda control stop. Behind them are Western Sydney, who are finally making a bit of a run and have opened up a 40 minute gap over αCentauri, Goko, and Blue Sky. These are the last Challenger teams remaining on the course - Chalmers, Adelaide, Halmstead, and Wakayama all had to finally throw in the towel and put the cars on the trailers today.
In the Cruiser class... between the bad sun yesterday, the bad headwinds yesterday and worse ones today, and the fact that Tennant Creek to Coober Pedy was the longest and most challenging leg of their race, none of the Cruisers were able to drive all the way to Coober Pedy. Apollo was forced to drop yesterday, Solaride put it in the trailer early today, and then Ascend... and finally Minnesota and Sunswift threw in the towel at nearly the same time today and loaded the cars onto the trailers in Marla so that they could make it to Coober Pedy before the end of the day.
Now that every single Cruiser team has failed to complete the course, it's a bit unclear what happens now. In one of the various group chats, someone pointed out that a strict reading of the regs gives us a method to determine the winner, but that no one actually gets awarded the cup?
Anyway, it appears that the winner will be determined by the performance of the cars that finished the Darwin to Tennant Creek leg, plus their practicality scores at the finish line. It's unclear what the Cruiser cars are all going to do for the rest of the event? They have a fresh grid charge and two days to drive down to Adelaide, but none of what they do from here on out counts in any way, so I guess they just chillax and party together for the rest of the drive? I have some thoughts about this competition format - that are basically unchanged since the scoring formula was revised for the 2017 event to use a target arrival time instead of rewarding faster elapsed times - but we'll save that discussion for after the event.
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