elkracing.com

[eh~AAssie]

LE6 round 9: eh vs hal-ko

The last match of the season, but still with some tension left. The clash between these two slightly unmotivated teams at the end of a season with more ghosts and delays than matches would decide which team would finish 2nd, after hal-ko got some easy points when GTi forfeited. None of the teams had practiced much, but it was still a fun match. It was also an weird match for t!m, who played several seasons for hal, and still do on TMS.

We started on the snow map. eh played with Gandos, Wity and myself. I forgot to save screens, and therefore I don't remember who played the maps for hal-ko. Instead of remembering one or two players per map, I choose to not mention any players out of respect for those I don't remember (better insulting the whole team than individual players ). This was a buggy map, with at least 7 places where random rebounds occured (how did this pass your control Mazzy after how picky you seemed to be with my maps?). It also contained a cut early on that eh didn't know about. I didn't check for any SCs this time, taking the chance that there was none... So even though the eh players seemed to be faster on all other parts of the map, we couldn't do squat when they gained 2 seconds on the cut.

So I decided I had to try to do that cut.
- Step 1: finding it. This cost me rounds 3 and 4.
- Step 2: Learning it: this cut down hal-ko's advantage and I even set a PB doing the SC quite poorly.
- Step 3: Doing the SC well. This happened in round 7, and I was on my way to a good 59 when I got a bad rebound at that pesky last jump and landed outside the road.

GG to hal-ko who won this map 7-0. SCs are a part of this game, and it's our fault that we didn't take the time to search for them.

Next it was a good (in my opinion) classical rally map. This map had a small cut early on, and the first thing I did was to try to chop down a tree. The rally car is obviously neither sharp enough or heavy enough to lay down the tree, so the tree won and chopped me down. Luckily I had Gandos and t!m with me on this map, and they saved the point. I answered in the next round with 56.85 (in your face tree!). Now I did some good consistent runs, usually winning in front of Gandos or t!m (I passed t!m in the last turn in one round, sorry mate ). At 5-0 to eh I missed the cut again. It turns out that the trees were co-operating today, and this time it was the other tree that gave me a puff. With the wall playing catcher, it was no other way than to respawn. But it didn't matter anyway. hal-ko drove excellent and finished 1-2-3 and got their first point of the map. The cut didn't let me down anymore, I got some more wins and eh won the map 7-2.

So it was all up to the kinda tricky desert lap map to decide. This was the only close map this evening, and all drivers fought side by side. All players shifted on making small mistakes, and sometimes one or two big ones. The score went: 1-0, 1-1, 2-1, 2-2, 3-2, 3-3. So this was really an intense battle, and most rounds were decided on the last lap. So also in the next round, which in reality decided the match. Both Gandos and I made some early mistakes, and hal-ko had two players in front for two laps, and I felt the point slipping away to excellent pace in front. But then one of them crashed, and eh suddenly had 2-3-4, which we managed to keep to the finish, even though t!m nearly blew it when he slid close to the end. This boosted eh's self confidence, and in the last round I had control in front with t!m in 2nd and Gandos in 4th. I could even afford myself a little safe driving on the last lap and the victory was ours 5-3. It was very fun to drive this map with two so equal teams. Thanks hal-ko!

So we conclude the season with a fun 2-1 match against a strong competitor. GG hal-ko!
This season went waaaaay beyond our wildest dreams. We finished some 10-12 places higher than we were aiming for back in November Obviously we trained a bit more than we had planned on too, but it was worth it.

Now we are looking forward to SL2. And btw, we could use some hungry additional players for this season. Gandos will most likely not be able to play any matches in a few months, and some old players seem to be a bit unmotivated. Without the joyful arrival of the LM players, our stable would be very skinny at this moment, but one or two more players would be very good for the team. Thanks for the fun everyone, cya soon!

AAssie