World Cup Down to the Wire

Note:  The 2012 World Cup of iRacing competition concludes Saturday with the Final Four clubs — Brasil, Finland, UK/Ireland and three time champion DE-AT-CH — squaring-off in races at Road America (HPD-ARX01c) and Texas Motor Speedway (Chevy Impala Nationwide).  The online races will be broadcast on Glacier TV, with the Road America round set to start at 8 pm GMT followed by the Texas race at 10 pm GMT.

iRacing Brasil will also be providing a Portuguese language stream for the event. Check out their coverage by clicking here.

In the meantime, Katier Scott offers some observations on the tournament thus far . . .

From early July when the first qualifier took place to this coming weekend, 37 clubs and 100s of drivers have all taken part in a battle to see if three-time World Cup of iRacing champions, DE-AT-CH can be beaten. Straight away it looked like the champions had a battle on their hands.

Three years ago Club England (now UK&I after merging with Celtic) ran the Germans and their allies close in a battle royale around Road America and Michigan.  Ultimately, however, the DE-AT-CH team was too strong, winning by 19 points with Club Ohio 50 points adrift in third ahead of MidSouth, Great Plains, New York and California.

In 2010 Club England were notable absentees from the competition, highlighting weaknesses in the system then in place and once again DE-AT-CH cruised to victory.  Their winning margin this time was 20 points with New England narrowly edging Club Ohio for P2. In stark contrast to 2012, Team France were the only other European-based club in the top seven, propping up the table with 42 points.

The following year England were back.  But in a revised format, DE-AT-CH utterly destroyed the competition, scoring 100 points while second placed Carolina were only on 48, England came home third with 18 ahead of Indiana.

Come the first qualifiers in a radically different 2012 tournament and Brasil shocked the establishment with a narrow victory over the reigning champions. 28th largest club (in terms of membership) Finland, showed that the minnows had a chance with a superb third while Aus/NZ, New York and England easily qualified for the tournament that took place last weekend.

Northwest booked their way in with a narrow eight point margin over Texas who would have to wait for Round 2 to qualify. Texas were successful in their quest although Virginias were most eager to qualify, beating the southern US club in the battle for the qualifiers top-spot as those clubs that had previously qualified took an easy time of it. Florida, California, Iberia, Team West and Carolina were the other qualifiers.

In the final qualifier the sleeping Italia exploded into life to take the top spot while Eastern Canada, Midsouth, Central-Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Western Canada and New Jersey also earned berths in the tournament stage of the competition.

With the 21 teams booked attention turned to the revamped Tournament stage.  DE-AT-CH and Finland spent the entire day swapping the lead with the World Champions coming home in the lead while Brasil edged UK&I into fourth — but more telling was the balance of participation.

Road America will host the opening event of the 2012 World Cup Finals.

In discussions after the tournament there were indications that some US-based clubs, some of whom had singuarly failed to score points, felt that club size was important.

While there was some truth in that, when the figures are analysed it’s clear that several US based clubs singularly failed to participate and that their failure to qualify was down to lack of team work or promotion by their clubs, rather than club size.

Of the four clubs that qualified, Finland were smallest with 522 iRacers, followed by Brasil (968) while DE-AT-CH had 1444 and UK&I had 1692 active drivers. Finland managed to bring 56 drivers to the competition, 10.73% of their entire line-up, while the other three clubs all fielded more than 60 entrants.

Contrast that with California: with 1316 active sim racers – within 100 of DE-AT-CH and 400 more than Brasil – they managed just SIX drivers.  Clearly they have the numbers to compete, but they comprehensively failed to do so. Iberia and CEE also failed massively to convert potential into attendance as, with clubs comparable in size to Brasil, they fielded just 11 drivers between them.

Other teams who failed to bring sufficient numbers to the table included Carolina (who let’s not forget came second last year), only fielded 39 drivers despite having 150 more active drivers than DE-AT-CH and only 100 less than UK&I.  Florida, Eastern Canada and Mid-South should also be singularly disappointed with their turn-outs as all have sufficient numbers to put in large numbers of drivers but all fielded less than 40;  indeed two only managed 28 between them.

As always there are two sides to every story, Aus-NZ failed to make the cut after a day-long battle with Brasil, despite an impressive (and record-setting) 79 drivers on the day. Northwest and Italy can be rightly pleased with their turn-outs – both clubs fielding higher percentages than UK&I — and Northwest scored strongly all day finishing seventh overall with 593 points, compared to UK&I’s 701.

Some comments were made that there was insufficient publicity but with half the clubs fielding over 25 drivers, clearly the message got to a large part of the population.  Maybe the effort needs to be made by the clubs who underperformed to get their members to take part in the forums and show interest in the club format rather than blaming numbers.

The 2012 World Cup champions will be crowned at Texas Motor Speedway.

A final word on numbers . . .

I feel New Jersey deserve a ‘shout out’ as they fielded seven members.  But with only 354 members overall they did impressively well to get this far and with 210 points managed to put many larger clubs to shame.

I think that highlights a point about the Tournament stage: even if you don’t think you’ll compete for the top four you can certainly find other competitions you can fight for..

The smaller Western Canada might try to ‘giant kill’ Eastern –  going for the highest percentage participation, best US club, Best north US club etc. — are all little competitions that could form part of the larger World Cup.

Get those rivalries going folks, because they are what will help drive your clubs to greater things!!!

Source: http://www.iracing.com/inracingnews/iracing-news/iracing-competitions/world-cup-down-to-the-wire

Kyle Thomas Busch Jeffrey Tyler Burton Richard Allen Craven Kerry Dale Earnhardt Ralph Dale Earnhardt Sr