The Giant Cup 12 is over, and we have a winner. In this news post I will go through the race environment by environment. Full results are in the end of the post, so if you don't want to spent your minutes with my text, scroll to the end of the post for the quick results!

This year we had 4 playoff servers with 12 players maximum, and 3 best guys from each server got a final spot. The 12 players in the finals, in rather random order, were  Red Shreder,  Sky,  Zooz,  Lolita,  Passi,  Aurel,  pranksta,  Tona,  Marius 89,  Lolomax,  Elco and  Minuit who got the spot after  Cibermix not willing to play and the next players in row ( DanikB,  Maxime) not coming. In years past we often had 16 finals spots, so now there were less players driving, but the average level of them was higher than a year ago.

The mappack of final round contained these seven maps:

Snow: Kappa with Fries (tuutti)
Bay: Thrivolity (Jeep aka Minuit)
Rally: Athée sur cher (Mama)
Stadium: Dengel's Wrath (RKO90)
Coast: Rlyehs Lament (wormi)
Speed: Last Chance (Tona)
Island: Unframed (Axatar)

Let's begin!

Snow: Kappa with Fries  51.65 Tona

The map built by tuutti had some hard turns like an early chicane and a tight wall part and was a difficult map to start with. As excepted, Lolomax won the first round and Elco, Zooz and Tona finished soon after him. Lolomax won the second round as well, this time ahead pranksta. The map continued as a show of Lolo: he won the first 9 rounds, until he crashed the 10th and last one getting only 5 points more, and the total score stayed as 230 points out of 250 available. However, behind him the race was tight, yet the gap was quite big. Zooz took the second place with 140 points and Tona got third with just one point less. Marius 89 drove safely and gained the fourth place with 121 points. Not surprisingly, Minuit got last with only 57 points on snow without preparation to drive. The fastest time of the match was driven by Lolomax with 52.28, and even with that one giant crash his average time was better than anyone else had. Lolomax got the confortable lead that he surely would need to keep his lead on some other environments. 

Bay: Thrivolity  45.08 by Passi

This bay map included a couple of hard turns that could decide the game. With many good bay players on server, a tight battle was excepted. Three players clearly stepped out though: Passi proved that his TA record wasn't an exception and scored 166 points. Elco showed some good performance as well with 157 points, and Marius 89 got 153 points being good on bay once again. Tona, Lolomax and Aurel also scored over 100 points. Crashes were quite common during the tight rounds, and no one drove the map too clean. The map overall was very tight, as the worst score was just 72 points so no one was a lot behind, and also the best times of players were rather close. Fastest one was driven by Elco with 45.59, but 5 other players as well drove sub-46 times. After bay Lolomax was still leading with 354 points in total, but Marius 89, Passi and Tona were all between 274 and 269 points.

Rally: Athée sur cher  49.92 by Cibermix

The rally map neither was too easy to drive reguralry fast. As Cibermix wasn't driving, there wasn't any clear top 1 player to dominate rally, so the map was as tight as bay for top drivers. The gap to others after top 4 was big though. Red Shreder showed his rally performance by winning the first round followed by Dunno players Marius and pranksta, and Sky as fourth player under 52 seconds.  The last speedy tunnel gave us a lot exciting finishes, but after 10 rounds Tona managed to get most points with 188 while Marius took 185 and Lolomax kept his lead in overall race with 172 points. Red Shreder had his best environment here with 150 points and gained the overall fourth place behind Lolo, Marius and Tona, who drove the fastest time with 50.67. Also Zooz got over 100 points with 106 of them, and kept his 6th overall placement. However, the difference between top 3 and Red was already about 90 points, but of course with four maps left it was still possible to close it.

Stadium: Dengel's Wrath  48.27 by Marius 89

We had a lot of good stadium driver on the server. Even Lolomax's stadium level was better than years before he dominated the Giant Cup 9 victory, so losing the first place overall wasn't likely. Stadium map by RKO was hard and included some turns where taking a risky, fast, line can result in a big crash and a bad finish position. We saw many crashes from several players: for example Elco lost a lead at least twice due to hitting rammstein or wall, and also Passi failed many top finishes due to crashes. After all it was Marius 89 who took the map with safe and fast driving, scoring 154 points. Tona and Passi both claimed 133 points, and Elco got 127. Lolita showed his stadium performance by winning one round and having 123 points, but also Lolomax drove himself 121 points and didn't lose his lead on his weakest environment. Behind th top, Sky caught Aurel in points and Lolita overtook both of them, while Passi took the fourth place back from Red Shreder. Zooz didn't manage to replay his last year's good stadium performance and got only 78 points, winning only Minuit on this map. 

Coast: Rlyehs Lament  52.11 by Marius 89

My coast map was excepted to be rather tight as well as a result of low speed of it. Players got the classic longer break between maps after stadium, and gathered energy for the last three maps of this final. Currently it was still Lolomax in lead, but now with only 34 points so the game was open. On the first round Aurel and Tona showed that their Air team is fast on coast by taking the top 2. Marius responded to Aurel's speed, but Lolomax was lost. Biggest surprise was when Elco, who often is good on coast, took only 76 points. However, Aurel won the map with 186 points, and Marius took second with 184 and also the best time with 53.21. Tona got 166 points as well, and while Lolomax had several fails like last corner slide on round 7 and got just 114 points, the situation in the top changed: Marius was now in lead with 779 points, and Tona took second with 774 points. Lolomax dropped as third with 761 points. Zooz and Red Shreder fighted behind the top, and Sky also mixed the pack by scoring over 100 points for a second map in a row overtaking pranksta and Lolita to take 9th total placement back. 

Desert: Last Change  46.77 by Lolomax

The desert map of the race was built by Tona, so he knew he was strong on it. However, Lolomax had the record, and since he often has scored well on desert we excepted a tight fight between those French starsplayers. The first round was won by Elco however, and Marius took the second place. On the second round Zooz showed the people he is still fighting for fourth spot overall despite his sevent place now and won the round. The following rounds Lolomax had two big crashes, and as Tona did a lot safer rounds, Tona won the points with 183, taking 17 points more lead to Lolomax and 40 points to Marius which meant he was leading the race with 30 points now. The fastest time was driven by Zooz, who finished the map in 47.21 and got 112 points. We saw one funny round in which pranksta slowed down right before finish line letting Marius pass him, but it didn't have too much affect on map points. Red Shreder, Passi, Aurel and pranksta took over 100 points as well, and now pranksta overtook Sky again. Minuit was already over 150 behind the second last place of Lolita, so something in results was already pretty much confirmed.

Island: Unframed  46.76 by Cibermix

Cibermix had the WR here as well. Axatar's speedy map wasn't that hard in terms of block selection and there was a lot space to drive it, but mastering it wasn't that easy. Pranksta took the first round ahead Tona and Lolo on the first round, and on the second round Zooz showed that he is on his home environment now by finishing first. Lolomax won next one, but then did a major fail and let Tona get 24 points lead overall, and stated that the title has been lost in in chat. On round 5, Tona and Lolomax got the same time and one round later Tona won Lolo by just 0.02 seconds. Again on round 7, Red Shreder won with 47.70, and Tona with Lolo got again equal times losing Red just 0.03. Zooz got a sick time of 47.16 during the last rounds. On round 9 Tona crashed, but so did Lolomax and as the gap stayed over 25 points easily the winner was clear: Tona! Taking 172 points on island he managed to keep the lead easily even though Lolomax scored two points more. Marius took the overall third place with 133 points on this map. Also Zooz did good times and took 148 points, but he didn't manage to overtake Red Shreder to get the fourth place overall as Red scored 141 as well. In the last positions pranksta kept Sky behind and took the 9th place overall.

Final results

Here are the final results of Giant Cup 12! Congratz to winner, the other podium and all finalists!

Rank	Player	Score
1	Tona	1129
2	Lolomax	1101
3	Marius 89	1055
4	Red Shreder	829
5	Zooz	778
6	Passi	752
7	Aurel	739
8	Elco	672
9	pranksta	653
10	Sky	628
11	Lolita	604
12	Minuit	427

Last but not least, here are some VOD links so you can watch it again. Sadly, the English VOD casted by riolu, me and Minuit wasn't saved anywhere, since we had just started to use hitbox and didn't know that it doesn't autosave streamed stuff if the settings aren't manually changed. Luckily we have a French and German VODs left still!

German VOD by StubbyTV

French VOD by Cibermix & Panoramix

Thanks to ET for this nice league! Also, thanks to Minuit for writing a couple of these news and helping me with this one as well!