F1 Fantasy 2020 Guide

Check out the 2021 guide here — https://medium.com/f1fantasytracker/f1-fantasy-2021-guide-58f0b9143241

F1 have just released their fantasy game for the 2020–2021 season so we’ve decided to do a guide for everyone playing this year. The guide will consist of things we’ve learned over the year, a review of the grid based on their price and expected performance, and a few line-up suggestions. This blog post will be followed by the re-launch of our website on Wednesday 4th March which we are excited for.

This guide is completely opinion based on what information we know from last years results and statistics, testing performances over the last 2 weeks, and on the opinions of other people, journalists and paddock. This means we’re capable of being entirely wrong, so we’ll try to justify as much as possible. We do welcome a discussion either on our reddit post, our discord or the reddit discord. For reference, our best placement overall last year was 27th (out of ~600,000).

Please enjoy!

Be sure to join our league — ba0081c43d

What we’ve learned

• You can increase your team’s $100 million budget.
  Drivers prices increase and decrease over the season, by using our average-points-per-million statistics, we were able to determine the drivers who were undervalued for their average performance. For example BOTTAS and RUSSELL had a value of average-points-per-million closer to 2. This meant that they were producing 2 points per million, as opposed to drivers like HAMILTON who produced for example 1.3 points per million. It showed who was due to rise in price because they out performed their value. What this allowed you to do was run a team that scored great, but also cost very little. By the midpoint of the season we had wildcard-ed our price increased team, ending up with ~$120 million, allowing us to destroy the second half of the season.
• Streaks are vital
  Most of the changes we made during the season were to take advantage of a drivers streaks. Netting 2 of a drivers streaks, race and qualifying streaks, you could score an extra 15 points. Picking the most consistent drivers rewarded you more than those 1 hit wonders. Coming into 2020 we have a new rule with the mega-driver, netting you 3x their points on any race you choose. The best time to use this would be when HAMILTON has lined up a streak or two and is expected to win, which could be near ~80 points.
• Always pick the better of the two team-mates
  When being left to pick your midfield, it is ALWAYS better to pick the better team-mate. For example RUSSELL or PEREZ or GASLY. All 3 drivers will reliably out qualify and out finish their teammates, this totals in an additional 5 points by that virtue alone.
• The numbers don’t lie
  That despite sentiment or love of certain drivers, some were truly not worth putting in any team lineup. The 2 that come to mind are RICCIARDO and NORRIS. Both most loved drivers on the grid but never lived up to what they could do. RICCIARDO suffered a lot from engine trouble (RENAULT having the highest engine failure rate of the season) and while NORRIS DID get into Q3 a lot, he more often than not dropped a bunch of places for whatever reason. This meant he was losing -2 points per position instead of 1, destroying anyone’s fantasy team running him.
• Focus on the average value.
  Most importantly the game is won on consistency over the course of a season. When you look at last season, PEREZ scored on average 13.81 per race while SAINZ scored 12.33. 1 of these two men got a podium yet the other out scores the other in average points. But while we say this, it’s important to note that PEREZ cost 11 million and SAINZ cost 8.9 million. What could you do with that 2.1 million? Pick up another high average scoring driver in the lower mid-field? These are the kinds of questions you have to ask yourself when selecting a team. Another example is RUSSELL scoring on average more points than HULKENBERG, despite being in a WILLIAMS. He regularly beat his teammate scoring those extra 5 points and because of reliability, rarely hit that -15 DNF.

These are some important learning points from last season that will influence the choices we make for our initial line-up. With the new addition of drivers values changing on sentiment, rather than performance, there is a totally new way to play added to the game. Something which we will post about at a later date.

Fantasy review of the grid

Please view the table above for the review of drivers. As mentioned before this is all subject to our opinion.

A few things to note, if you want to have FERRARI or either VETTEL or LECLERC, you’re better off having RED BULL and VERSTAPPEN who have a better chance of scoring more points.

There are some clear undervalued drivers as well as overvalued. Whats left is the magic in scoring the most amount of points. This would be in our opinion between GASLY, NORRIS, OCON and RAIKKONEN. For all 4 drivers you can’t make a real solid pick, just based on a hunch. As you can tell our hunch is on GASLY.

In terms of CONSTRUCTORS, you should really only be picking MERCEDES. A constructor is the sum of its 2 drivers and MERCEDES is the only constructor that’s usually gonna get their 2 drivers on the podium each race.

Line-up suggestions

GASLY can be interchanged with NORRIS, KIMI, and OCON.

If you want to run SAINZ, it does mean you miss out on STROLL and have to have LATIFI.

For anyone looking not to use HAM or MERC.

If you don’t believe in STROLL.

We hope you found this guide informative, if you need any help or suggestions with your line-ups, as mentioned we welcome all discussion and debate on either reddit or discord.

In upcoming posts we’ll be launching our new website and discussing the new dynamic pricing update.

Good luck!