CabinCon Cup: Part 1, Monza

As I recapped earlier, we were able to run a small 2-race CFR championship at our game gathering, CabinCon.  Since we had some new players, we ran a quick demo of the track through the first turn.  I showed the rest of players how to crash out in spectacular fashion by pushing my car 60 mph over the top cornering speed and rolling boxcars (12).

With a couple of turns under their belt, everyone was ready to build their cars and start up the actual race.

We bid out for position: Sterling in Red, James in Silver, Jeremy in Yellow, Reese in Blue, me in Green, and Colton in Black in the very back.  It probably would have been good to record the driver car layouts but I forgot.  I didn’t really build for a “rear strategy” but there I was, looking at the 5th spot.

After the first two turns, I was able to crowd the line with Reese and Jeremy to fight for second place before the first turn.

I then decide to push hard and ditch the line spending as much wear as possible to beat Reese and Jeremy.

I push hard again and cut off Sterling in the lead.

Using my higher speed and better acceleration, I push out ahead of Sterling to take the lead.

The pack tightens up behind us and start battling for 3rd place.

Colton is tired of trying to fall in line behind the 3rd place fighters and pushes hard to skip the optimal line and go toe-to-toe with Reese in the blue car.  Sterling sticks with me through the corner.

I decide to push in these corners again and create a gap between Sterling and I.  Colton isn’t able to capitalize on his fight with Reese and falls back to deal with James.

Colton drops back to 5th as he loses his fight with James and I maintain my one space gap on Sterling, insuring he can’t draft off me.

I decide to keep my speed up through this little turn and Sterling is able to close the gap while James starts to battle Reese for 3rd.

We make a bad rules call not realize that Sterling could accelerate while in the turn’s last space and it puts him 2 spaces behind me.

I get through the turn easily while James and Reese battle some more and Colton swoops in waiting for someone to make a mistake.

We wrap up the first lap with Reese, Colton, and James in a 3-way spread for 3rd while I maintain my gap on Sterling.

Sterling plays the lead up to the turn slow and Reese decides to push and pass through Sterling. The gamble pays off and he squeezes past Sterling to set up a good start for attacking 2nd place.  Colton decides again to ignore the line and pushes to battle for 2nd.

The fight takes it’s toll. Colton pushes hard to gain on Reese, taking 2nd, Reese is forced off his line and Sterling is forced to chance and spins out.  I smile as my lead widens.

The racers form up and Colton pushes a little faster than Reese and gains some breathing room.  Jeremy starts to battle James for 5th place as he starts to make his move, spending his nice bank of wear tokens.

Reese closes the gap on Colton and the bottom half of the players start to bunch up.

Everyone bogs down slightly in the corner and I push to increase my lead to a comfortable margin.

James isn’t able to take the corner and Sterling and Jeremy push past, knocking James down to the 6th spot.

Coming into the final turns, Colton gets jammed up in a corner as he forgets which card was his current speed and which was the new speed and ends up spending his last wear token in the penultimate corner.  Reese still has enough in the tank to capitalize and charge into 2nd place.

I sweep the corner easily and since we fixed the corner rule mistake, Reese is able to accelerate out of his corner while Colton is stuck at his previous speed and loses ground on Reese.

Colton tries to push this corner to take Reese but without a token, he has to dice it.  He ends up in a spin with a horribly 20 mph start speed.  Jeremy is solidifying his 4th place bid at the time and now eyes a very worried Colton.

The dice Gods are not pleased and Colton tries to push his start speed but ends up jamming gears and goes nowhere. Jeremy pushes the corner and also spins out allowing James to catch up and Sterling to overtake into 4th place.  Reese and I easily cross for 2nd and 1st, respectively.

Colton and Jeremy both start back up and are neck and neck but Jeremy is on the faster outside.  Sterling breaks away from both for a solid 3rd place and James tries to make a move but also ends up in a spin.

Colton is able to stay with Jeremy all the way through the finish and takes a photo finish 4th place.  Monza completes and we have the initial standings.

We decided to make a custom scoring system to keep the points tight race to race:

• 1st: 3.0 pts
• 2nd: 2.1 pts
• 3rd: 2.0 pts
• 4th: 1.2 pts
• 5th: 1.1 pt
• 6th: 1.0 pts

This system kept things from looking bleak between last and first place and allowed for some slight tie-breakers with the fractional points.  After Monza, we tackled Nürberg.