Our next guest quickly drove her way to Elite on slippery roads paved with ice. Introducing the IceWomen F1 Racing team’s first entrant to the big stage …
Mery Lissarrague Career start: S61 Elite since: Inaugural season Current standing: 34th S70 final standing: 3rd with 73 points (Master-5)
IceWomen F1 Racing Established: S31 Best finish: 49th (S70) Current Standing: 238
Mery, please tell us a little about yourself, your background, and what attracted you to GPRO.
I am from San Fernando, 20 [miles] north from Buenos Aires, Argentina. PhD in physics and working in finances currently. I am married to a GPRO player (Ignacio Belatti) who engineers race cars for a living, so that made me start watching real life races—I used to pay no attention at all to that before meeting him—and later when he started playing GPRO I started discussing aspects of the game with him. After he joined a team and started moving up the ranks, I decided to join myself and we made some silly bets about who could climb to Master faster or who can get to Elite first. I clearly won the bet but now it would be fun to race against each other so I can beat him. XD
Now, seriously, I am not a video game player-like person, but more a card games player and an avid reader, but once I started playing here I was addicted to the game dynamics and how you have to plan long term and manage random variables like weather and other player’s actions all in the same place. Also, in honour to my husband I have to say that he was a good mentor (apart from too much “FOBY," but well... that’s the way he has been mentored he claims) and I owe him for his advice for planning and of course, the big help of the team of Chicas I joined soon after started playing.
Do you have any particular long-term goals in your first Elite stint or do you see this as a chance to observe and gain experience?
I think I have a very good but young and rather inexperienced driver in Desire. So my main goal is to avoid relegation because it would be sad to lose her and see her winning a championship with another manager after all the effort. I’m sure she is champ material! Apart from that, I know I lack staff skills and that it will be hard to stay where I am. No other long term goals, I prefer [to play] step by step.
How was your promotion to Elite celebrated in the team? Was there any special significance to being the first to make it to the top?
Yes, they were super happy and they were great helping me to raise data and understand some aspects from the game. There were a lot of things I could learn thanks to data from Michaela Källström who was very, very close to get to Elite some seasons ago when I was in Amateur—and I’m sure she will get it. And after that also Sherry Sunderland and Bastiana Torres at Pro helped a lot so I could understand the different steps and difficulties you find in the game regarding driver planning and TD and tyre choices. Also, some other players from my country wrote to congratulate me for the effort and that makes me happy.
Given your tyre selection of Contis, naturally you have been displeased with the cold temperatures through the first seven races. What is your view on the weather dynamic in the game and how it affects race results? Do you think this is applied in a fair way?
If weather is random as they say, I have nothing to cry about. Sometimes there can be a streak but it is inside the possibilities and we all have to deal with it. I used the cold weather to save car parts and build aggressiveness but right now I’m starting to suffer with sponsors the way Haas F1 is suffering with Rich Energy! :)
Do you find GPRO to be a welcoming place for women? Is the community sexist?
I think it is not particularly welcoming nor unwelcoming for the fact of being a woman, so not sexist at all. As I see it, here it doesn’t matter at all where you are or from or which sex, but your game play and how you interact with the community. We have people from all around the globe and everybody has been super cool with me!
We wish Mery continued success in the game!
For Elite Press, I’m Brad Marshall hoping you always beat your spouse on track.
Do you find GPRO to be a welcoming place for women? Is the community sexist?
Thanks @Brad Marshall (A92) for asking this question! I think being a mainly-dudes-crowd we do have the obligation to keep in mind that our banter and silliness doesn't descend into sexism. However, I personally feel like the GPRO community is doing relatively OK in that aspect and I'm glad to see this confirmed from a woman's point of view.
Quote ( Alexander Kunze @ July 23rd 2019,12:24:24 )
Quote
So there is quite not much time left to do all the basic stuff. (including studying your group opponents etc.)
I'd rather like to see question about how to manage all this in such a short time than about sexismus. :D
I will answer this one: my job does include a lot of excel dynamic table working. Imagine people watching at a blue background webpage at my laptop during work hours: they would start wodering what am I doing! but sssshhhhh dont tell anyone im analysing GPRO after lunch at work :) I am exporting all the data I can, using an external tool and also copypasting the data that cant be exported. Then I set races from home and post in our team forum, not much time left to be very chatty in the community forum I have to say.
So IceWomen team has all of the Jaguar secrets? I wish my wife had any interest whatsoever in F1 or games, i would get her to join IceWomen.... hahaha ... well, congratulations and it was a great read. It looks like elite in gpro is about to get interesting ...
Of course not. The only way that’s possible would be if she finds out the password to my laptop. To be fair, she earned herself the way to Elite and now I have to live with that :/
Quote ( Mery Lissarrague @ July 23rd 2019,13:45:32 )
I will answer this one: my job does include a lot of excel dynamic table working. Imagine people watching at a blue background webpage at my laptop during work hours: they would start wodering what am I doing! but sssshhhhh dont tell anyone im analysing GPRO after lunch at work :) I am exporting all the data I can, using an external tool and also copypasting the data that cant be exported. Then I set races from home and post in our team forum, not much time left to be very chatty in the community forum I have to say
Thanks for the detailed replay.
Good luck for your project.
so show him
Quote ( Ignacio Belatti @ July 23rd 2019,17:55:48 )
To be fair, she earned herself the way to Elite and now I have to live with that :/
So IceWomen team has all of the Jaguar secrets? I wish my wife had any interest whatsoever in F1 or games, i would get her to join IceWomen.... hahaha ... well, congratulations and it was a great read. It looks like elite in gpro is about to get interesting ...
Ok, I gotta go to bat for Luke here. Why all the down thumbs? Am I missing something in his post?
Quote ( Ignacio Belatti @ July 24th 2019,00:28:44 )
worst thing is that having the team mates I have, knowing hers makes no difference :)))
Yes you are correct,, But 99%, of those who have commented , and 99% of those who have not ! don't Have Mery's Knowledge ! Sorry Ignacio,, But you have to stick with Jaguar :):):):)
Our next guest is an old friend, what the Brits call a “top bloke”* and a manager who has not missed a race since April 2, 2008.
*American translation: “awesome dude”
Mike Baston Career start: S8 Elite since: Inaugural season Current standing: 30th S70 final standing: 3rd with 65 points (Master-4)
Versant Racing Established: Between S7 and S8 as The Twilight Zone Best finish: 3rd (S50) Top ten finishes: 14 (S8, 35-36, 47-51, 54-55, 58-59, 62, 70) Current Standing: 33rd
Mike, you are a true dinosaur of the game going all the way back to S8 but here you find yourself in Elite for the first time. Well, what took you so long? :-p
To be totally honest, it's never really been a massive concern to me overall because I know & have seen what I consider better managers than me come & go without making Elite. In saying that though it has only been in the past few seasons that I began to realise that I probably could make it to Elite with all the knowledge & support available to me in Versant. At that point I decided that I owed it to those teammates past & present to give it a proper shot. I certainly would not have done it without the support received last season in particular.
All this from the person who spent half a season having to manage a driver salary of £8.8m after a fat-fingered offer. I did prove to my teammates though that you could make money in Pro so every cloud & all that.
Retaining Elite seems to be a choice between Contimental and Badyear. What steered you towards the latter? Did the extra bar of dry performance make them more appealing or did it come down the wet performance?
Actually, it was not the tyre stats that was the start point for my decision. I was surprised how may car stacked up pre-season & I knew what my car plan for the season looked like initially so that gave me a bigger range of tyres to consider. The extra dry bar of Badyears did increase their attractiveness even with the poor warm up performance. I suspected that a lot of managers would either go Conti's or Hancocks for the temp benefits so I plumped to go mid-range temp-wise & gamble on a non-extreme weather season. Unfortunately, that one's gone boobies up so far.
Any regrets from not being able to score in the early season with cold temperatures?
At the time, no of course not because (a) I was still getting a grasp of how different competing in Elite was, & (b) there were, what I thought, plenty of opportunities to challenge during the rest of the season. However now at race 11, it does make me realise that you need to take any opportunity when it presents itself. No regrets overall, just new things learned. If things don't work out this season I can always come back & put these new things into practice in the future.
Your tenure at Versant is almost as long as your GPRO career itself; having joined in S24, only Tim Wagner has been there longer and only Jukka Sereni has scored more team points. Could you talk about the evolution of the team from the early days to now? What has changed? What is constant?
That's a long time ago now & quite difficult to remember. At the start, even though it was S24 there was still a lot of data collection and analysis, in particular what made a competitive driver at different levels of the game & of course tyres had been a recent addition so gaining as much data on all of the brands as possible. The team history shows that changes in personnel have not been too regular which I guess means that has been constant in itself. The sense of fun & not taking things to seriously because it is just a game has always been a constant so character has been as important in being a Versant team member as knowledge/performance has been.
Barring a few odd good seasons we had never been a major player in terms of results but well known in terms of personalities, hence our appearances in under achieving team category of the GPRO awards. This probably changed after our 4th place finish in S35 & we started to a get a bit more serious on the performance related side. It wasn't an instant improvement though although we did see Kiran Patel make Elite a few times.
Obviously that change in focus meant that we began to get on top of game changes a lot quicker than we used to do in the past, with more intent on solving the new problems asap which was crowned by the glory of Jukka’s back-to-back championships.
Nowadays with the Taskmaster at the reins, we still have the fun side of the team but just get the occasional whipping to keep us on course. No different to when you were with us.
Longtime team leader Jonathan Beagles recently returned to the game, and then to Versant. Is it just like old times again? Are fines* being levied left and right?
Fines were not really a Jon thing, it developed more when a certain Australian (Troy Sheahen) was in the team & has continued since under our own self-regulation with Mikko happily administering the fine bucket.
As for Jon returning, anyone who knows Versant's history will know that very few people leave the team because they want to, the majority of the time it's because RL deems they have to as you yourself can testify. This means that we have always been a team to welcome previous team members back after any hiatus if they apply to join when a vacancy comes up. Am sure it was quite strange for Jon to re-apply to the team he had run for so long but he had no qualms about doing so. Our team events [page] is littered with people who have come, gone & come back again but it is rarely like old times because the game has developed constantly that it just can't be exactly like it was.
*A lighthearted system in which a team member may be charged a number of supporter credits for “infractions” such as under fueling, selecting the wrong tyre, or just for the amusement of others.
Versant has traditionally abstained from the driver project model to reach Elite, preferring instead to use short-term drivers while rebuilding in Pro and Master. However, with four team members currently in Amateur—a rare sight for the team—could that philosophy be changing somewhat and, if so, what is driving the change?
Well thanks for giving away our strategy.......lol. Seriously, I think is unfair to say Versant as a team has made a conscious decision to abstain from driver projects, it's just been the choice of individual managers. Some managers have tried project drivers before but failed with them, especially in the early days of driver energy as it was difficult to get the suitable results to continue the projects.
The number of members in Amateur is as much about rebuilding in general as it is choosing driver projects. Both Graham & Martin fall into this category & they made a well-thought-out decision to rebuild overall, not just because of a single factor. I guess with choosing to rebuild it gives you the option to re-try some methods that your previous situation did not allow because you'd become trapped.
Please tell me you were voted S70 Versantian of the Season.
Yes..........eventually lol ;)
Finally, any chance you can get Mr. Boss Man off his ass and back into Elite? ;)
Do you think I have a death wish now have made it to Elite? Mikko is a unique individual & something of an enigma to the majority of the people but I just put that own to the Finnishness. He will do what he wants, when he wants & how he wants & nobody will influence him to do anything else. When you do see him in Elite again, you will know that it is because he wants to be there again & will have his own reasons for doing so. He has enough of a task keeping the rest of us in check so he's got enough to keep him occupied for the foreseeable future.
Big thanks to Mike for a great interview!
For Elite Press, I’m Brad Marshall reminding you to only advance to Elite if it makes you happy.
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