Predictions! Play it safe or not?
First of all I’d like to apologize for posting yet another “podium prediction” article, even though you’ve already seen at least a dozen of those and submitted your entries to all of them, patiently and politely. As much fun as they are, sometimes you’re just fed up with all the predictions and expectations and you just want to forget all about it and stick to rooting for them all. But similar to how you cannot like both Formula 1 and WRC, there is no mixing the podium predictions and personal favourites in WRC. OK, so you can like both WRC and F1, unless you’re strange in a funny way, but can you predict the winner and at the same time betray your personal favourite, bestest ever driver of them all? Of course you can, in fact that’s exactly what you should do.
You see, when you stick to your favourite, bad things happen to him. You will listen to radio coverage patiently and just as radio host was about to mention your favourite driver’s split time, you would freeze because instead of the split host would deliver a bleak news, saying your bestest of best has crashed or stopped. No, this cannot be, it must be a coincidence. But it’s not, and science backs it up. If you want your favourite to win, you should never bet on him, in fact you should pretend you hate him. That’ll net him some strong results and wins even.
Of course, all this makes no sense, but tell me how much sense is there in podium predicting in a sport which can literally turn from victory to retirement in a split second, and you’re not even there to see it unfold. We invented rally predictions because we cannot be on all stages and in all corners at the same time, and we need something to keep us entertained until the show begins. Once it does, you better forget all about predictions, because unless you’re the one holding the steering wheel in a car you’re betting on, you’re as much in control as the driver sliding off the road on black ice with nothing but slicks on his shiny WRC machine. If this article was to make any sense at all, it would now be a good time to say that lack of control is what makes predicting fun, but I’m not sure I like having sense in this particular post. No, let’s keep it silly all the way.
All that said, here are my predictions for Monte Carlo. You can be sure I’ll be posting completely different predictions on other websites and in Twitter discussions. Just because.
1. Sebastien Ogier
2. Kris Meeke
3. Robert Kubica
4. Thierry Neuville
5. Francois Delecour
What’s yours?
