With the first part of the season completed, let's have a look at What Could Have Been. If you go to the Virtual Directeur Sportif website and log in, you can download the complete VDS rider list with their current scores. Open the resulting .csv file with your favourite spreadsheet program, add an "Efficiency" column (score divided by price) and you are set to lament your poor rider picking skills. Hey, we are only a few months in, it could still all turn around! :rolleyes: Lots of tables after the jump.

First the easy bit, the most efficient team you could have picked. Best bang for the buck. Just sort the table of riders on descending Efficiency and pick the first 25 riders. As you can see below, that gives you a staggering 6700 points for a total salary cost of just 40. Almost a 1000 points more than current leader Vinnie's barbarians at about a quarter of the cost but, you know, who could have predicted all these hopeless one-pointers to do so well?!

Now for a stab at the highest possible scoring team. That is more difficult because there is a spending limit of 150 points (and of course the 24 and 18 point caps) so you want big scores but also efficiency. Simply sorting by current score still doesn't make it straightforward to pick a team that plays by the rules. Well, the VDS rules, I mean. Still, the goal is getting a big score so the 25 highest scoring riders is a good start. Just outside the cut at 26 is VDS favourite George Hincapie with a score of 360:

Hmm, over budget by 242 points, 7 riders costing 24+, 11 riders costing 18+ … "Team Sky Is The Limit" seems a good name for this first try. So, leave only the highest scoring 24+ pointer and the three highest scoring 18+ pointers, then fire the lowest scoring riders to comply with the budget restriction of 150. That leaves:

Now comes the tricky part, there is still one more rule: we need 25 riders and this team only has 13. Some inefficient riders (all is relative) need to be fired and make room for cheaper alternatives who still scored big. Removing Hesjedal from the roster gives 8 points in the budget for 13 riders. Not enough. "Are you sure you want to fire Alexandre Vinokourov from your team?" Yes, yes I am. That leaves us with 22 points to spend on 14 riders. Ten-pointers are out of reach and we need at least 6 one-pointers or we won't be able to hire 14 riders. Add the 6 highest scoring one-pointers to the team. Now we are left with 16 points for 8 riders and the tedious task of adding up the scores of all possible permutations from the pool of riders costing 1 to 8 points:

• 1x8 (Hesjedal) + 1x2 (Gasparotto) + 6x1 = 1750
• 1x6 (Brown) + 1x4 (Hammond) + 6x1 = 1645
• 1x6 (Brown) + 3x2 (Gaspa, Bos, Roulston) + 4x1 = 1700
• 2x4 (Hammond, Eisel) + 2x2 (Gaspa, Bos or Roulston) + 4x1 = 2055
• 1x4 (Hammond) + 5x2 (same 3 as above, Haedo, Pozzovivo) + 2x1 = 1985
• 8x2 (same 5 as above, Ferrari, Eeckhout, Marcato) = 1715

Clearly the best choice then is to pick Hammond and Eisel, with Gasparotto and either Bos or Roulston (they both scored 220 points) and four 1-pointers (in last place: Kreder, Oss and Bernabeu all scored 140 points; I pick Kreder). There we have it, I think this is the highest possible scoring VDS team for 2010, up to and including LBL:

A mind-boggling total score of almost 12,000 points. Take that, Vinnie1! Next break in the season is probably after the Tour, I guess I'll be glad to have scored 12,000 points by then.