PCM 2011 Diary – Stage 2: Teams Up Against the Clock

Is there anything more complicated in the world of cycling than a team time trial? Cause if there actually is I might not be interested in the way it works.

Imagine this: nine men, all in skin tight suits and with helmets that are designed to minimize the aerodynamic drag, lined up on a road, the front one pulling the others as hard as he can for a number of seconds, usually less than 30, before dropping to rest at the back of the group.

As the team time trial progresses, one or two of the team might be left behind altogether (the team needs five people to finish to get a time at the finish line) while the most experienced time trialist in the team moves forward and takes up more shifts.

It's an impressive spectacle of human strength and team work, but it's also very specialized and hard to understand for newcomers to cycling and, in the space of Pro Cycling Manager, it's one of the events that tends to get the simulation treatment, with players just setting the pace and waiting to see the results.

I use to do that in old PCM games, but I wanted to see if I could do better this year and if the new found physicality of the game would alter the mechanics, so I ran the entire time trail (not too long at 23 km).

I managed to win it pretty easily after a number of fumbles about the effort percentages and after exhausting all of my team, especially my main time trial powerhouse Fabian Cancellara, the man also known as Spartacus in the peloton because of his ability to just get into position and pump away, eating road kilometers.

The big problem for me is with Fabian also getting the much-wanted Yellow Jersey, I will have to spend a number of days defending it from other teams, especially sprinter-based ones, like Lampre-ISD or HTC.

Cancellara cannot climb to save his life so I will have to decide when to switch the effort from protecting my current jersey wearer to putting all team mates in the service of general classification challenger Andy Schleck.

Here's a clip from the second stage as simulated in Pro Cycling Manager 2011: