1) Nice to see Grosu win the stage. Always good to see that the top favourite has a shot.

2) Second terrible stage by Eislers. He "improves" to a 19th place after being 2nd favourite on back-to-back stages. Just terrible. My head canon is that he dropped back to lead Skujins back into the peleton because that is probably the only acceptable excuse for his performance.

3) Speaking of which: Skujins' positioning gave me a huge shock. Glad he came back in the end but that split could have been very costly.

4) I dont mind that we havent entered the breakaways yet. We will need every last bit of energy on the upcoming hilly stages.

5) Love to see two mass sprints on the first two flat stages. Much appreciated to see that and plays into my team's cards even when the results themselves were terrible.

6) All eyes are now on the next few stages. Stage 3 can basically make or break our race already. Basically no gapped riders so far should guarantee that the breakaway riders are s.t. in GC which might reduce the pelotons willingness to give larger gaps to the break. If we get a large group to the line together i really rate the chance of Skujins although especially Gesink shouldnt be underestimated either. But more so on stage 4 than on stage 3. Go Skujins!

7) Harrison and Grosu have collected enough bonus seconds that Skujins can not surpass them when they finish in the same group. Will be interesting if they can hold on to the favourites as the first 185km are relatively easy.

Wow, now a 2nd place. Lets not let the breakaway win any stages

Very happy with that, as Grosu is the well deserving winner, so 2nd is still a great result. Before seeing the startlist, if Hayakawa got a 2nd place result and (looking like) multiple Top 10's I'd be very happy. Believe we've scored 50 points or so already, only 2 days into the race, a fifth of what I got at the Giro.

Puzzled by this, definitely think the difference in wage across sprinters should be small. But not sure Harrison should be more expensive because he had the good fortune/good planning to be sent to where the sprint field was small/weak? Doesn't that (a)punish good (lucky) race planning and (b) just encourage dropping riders so you can pick up any one of the similar sprinters in FA who weren't as lucky?

Where performance reflects subtleties not reflected in the OVL formula this makes sense to me but not sure that is the case here.

I have enjoyed the relatively clean sprints in the first two stages but sympathize with Knockout as Eislers is the outlier. I wonder if the game engine is treating Eislers as a rouleur and that is why he isn't sprinting.

Looking forward to the rest of the race.

I'm puzzled by that too but i dont really believe that pcm is treating him as rouleur since he did very well in the Giro where he was lower on the list of favourites. Dont think pcm would see him as a sprinter in the Giro and then as a rouleur here. Maybe pcm is confused by me having Liepins as top 10 sprinter too? ( though Liepins does even worse)

Don't remember everything by heart, but normally if a team/rider really tries to be in the break but fails to do so, I try to mention them. There might be a chance one of your riders tried for five seconds to be in the break in one of those first two stages, but in general you can conclude that they were quite absent as I haven't mentioned them at all. Hope that answers your question

I hadn't noticed Leipens, that makes me think it is more likely because I was also wondering why it didn't happen in other races. Leipins was on the favorites list in stage 1. In the testing I have done, if you have 2 sprinters and one of them has strong FL/RES/ST it will treat him as a rouleur rather than using one to lead out the other. Then in stage races the rouleurs tend to be inactive which makes it more screwed up. And in the one day races the rouler will attack even if the sprinter on his team is the favorite for the sprint. Which is why one-day sprints tend to have very messy finishes.

That said, not sure, because Silvestre has worked as a lead out for Swift for Berg in some races but not others. So there must be other considerations.

A little bit late to the party, but also thanks for the great preview from me. I have no idea what I can expect from Reis after his awful Giro. I hope he can redeem himself and at least finish around similar strong riders. If he should drop out of GC contention again, I hope he does it early so my team will go into more breakaways as I definitely have some suiting riders for that in my team (Smith, Quita, Boonratanathanakorn, Kasperkiewicz, Nielsen).
It's also nice to see Jakobsen in the sprinters list and he has already delivered in the first two stages. It is very unfortunate that he got the short end of two very close millimeter decisions, but I'm happy with him being in contention at all.
Unbelievable that ISA is again profiting from a lottery so much. Having been seen as one of the major relegation candidates pre-season it looks like they have already saved themselves from that as their gap to the danger zone should be quite large by now. Of course lots of lucky results involved in that, but they also have to be forced by spot on planning. Hats off.
Also congrats alex on the win by Grosu, hope some more will come!

Damn straight Lecuisinier!

Too bad no gaps were awarded as we could have used some GC points already, but we seem to just trail them. First with Bouglas 5th in GC and now Lecuisinier.

I guess I'll just have to be very happy with two stageresults in the very early part of the race where it' couldn't be expected.

Tomorrows stage screams of breakaway-succes, but if not it should (on paper, so probably not) suit Lecuisinier even better.

Terrible terrible stage for us. The rest of the team didnt seem to be a great help but more crucially, Skujins with a half-hearted lead from over a kilometer out when no escapees are ahead anymore. Thats just terrible judgement. Finishing behind guys like Formolo or Tenorio ... i wanna throw up. the decision to send him here might backfire spectacularly and a 6th place is all i got from having 1x the clear cut top favourite and twice the second favourite. This race might be over for us before it started and I'm not sure if we can still save it.

Congrats, kinda the guy that you'd expect irl wins here, finally working his stat combination well. Our team did reasonably well and tried decently which is nice. More breaks, please!

vdP on paper probably could have done something here, late top 15 or something but didn't try. Positioning of my riders in general wasn't ideal here, so lucky there were no gaps.

Toupalik still rider of the race for me, collecting KoM and youth points here and there. Nothing huge but still decent amount of needed points. As 28th he also surprisingly was the best team rider here.

Congrats to Yates, decent winner even though Skujins should have when properly being supported .

Ouch, that Skujins failure must hurt... It really made no sense here trying to pull for more than 1km, with the breakaway out of contention. Just really bad timing.
Kudos to the PCT teams, though, great job today! And Lecuisier already getting a slight bonus-second advantage over Tenorio, surely not a bad thing.

Still to early to cry. But.. Just give me some hope for breakaway appearances! Haig won't do too much stage results, I guess.

What's up with our team and random ass punctures this year lmao

Lecuisinier laying down the hammer already early in the race!
I think we got already as many stages that didn't go to the break as in the Giro

Half The Giro had 6 stages not going to the break, besides the TTs (4x flat, 1x HTF, 1x MTF). I guess the sample size isn't big enough yet to really draw conclusions

Good to have some guys in the break after a couple of anonymous days. I see Malecki at 16th place today, he's certainly up to something here

That was actually good positioning by Formolo, shame he didn't have the legs to finish it. 5th is ok though

Nothing is going as planned for Evonik it seems, while Lecuisinier (whom I share the last name with btw) seems to be set to be dominating the race.

Good display from Lammertink and Brambilla. They missed out on the top 10 but it's not really a stage finish where you expect more than that from them. Hopefully, once we reach the breakaway stages they will be in the mix.

Too bad Harrison wasn't distanced there. A day in the red jersey would have been nice for Grosu. But we'll take two in the green jersey for now.

What a day! Very happy for Yates! His fourth win for the program and the program's fifth win at the Vuelta. Tenorio in the mix as well is nice to see. Lost a few seconds to Lecuisinier, but if Tenorio can stay close enough to take red on the Stage 9 TT, I like our chances to challenge for the overall win.

Edit: Another fun fact... The in-game date for Stage 3 is May 13. My IRL birthday. Thanks for the fictional birthday present!