I have seen Sagan (73) and Ulissi (74) finish top10 on mountain top stages in the Tour when I had them as a free role rider on auto pilot and was only manually controlling the captain (UrĂ¡n) and his helpers.
I've also won the Tour de San Luis against Contador with Kwiatkowski (75 climbing - I always use the PCMDaily 2014 mod) narrowly losing on the worst ascents and beating him comfortably in the mid-range mountain stages, and ended 3rd in a bunch sprint with Brambilla (in the Tour of Sibiu - needed the time bonus to beat the 1st Jose Herrada in the last stage and beat him by 3 seconds in the end) - meaning that even mediocre sprinters like Ulissi can pack more than a dozen seconds of bonuses in every flat stage with team support.
This made me wonder, what are your experiences with pushing powerful non-GC riders to their limits in the mountains and how do you do it? It'd seem a nice challenge to try and win a Tour with lots of hilly stages (one of the Tour courses available in the PCMDaily update is well suited for this, same as the standard '14 Vuelta course) with Sagan or Ulissi, would it be possible on normal difficulty?
Omloop wrote:
I got Sagan to finish 7th in the tour in Pcm 2014. He had 73 mountain atm.
Did you manually control every single stage when you did that? If so, do you think it was the absolute max you could get out of him? What kind of riders did you use to support him with and did you stick to the 84 dot strategy? In my experience lesser climbers need to use LESS effort on dot to limit their losses to GC contenders but I have so far not found an optimum tactic for it....
Omloop wrote:
I got Sagan to finish 7th in the tour in Pcm 2014. He had 73 mountain atm.
Did you manually control every single stage when you did that? If so, do you think it was the absolute max you could get out of him? What kind of riders did you use to support him with and did you stick to the 84 dot strategy? In my experience lesser climbers need to use LESS effort on dot to limit their losses to GC contenders but I have so far not found an optimum tactic for it....
I manually controlled every stage and used mediocre climbers to back him in the mountains and flat specialist in the flats to keep him fresh. My strategy is to always dot as low as possible without dropping and attack in the downhills.Myexperience is that the downhill are almost as important then the acents.
I manually controlled every stage and used mediocre climbers to back him in the mountains and flat specialist in the flats to keep him fresh. My strategy is to always dot as low as possible without dropping and attack in the downhills.Myexperience is that the downhill are almost as important then the acents.
Ever tried using a better climber, someone with stats similar to Fuglsang or Poels, to guard him instead? I noticed that sometimes when defending Kwiatkowski in high altitude mountains the last helper, if good enough, even ends up with red and yellow left when at the last summit... don't know if this affects the fatigue of the lesser rider he is protecting though.
