F1 Fantasy 2021 Guide
Click here for my post testing thoughts
2021 marks the 3rd season for F1 Fantasy tracker and we look forward to continuing the success of the website and our community from last year. We’re updating the website again for a full new lean look that will be more mobile friendly and we aim to grow the discord even more to build on the great and fun active community we already have. We’ve seen the impact we’ve had on our users and hope we provide that same service to even more, especially with the game being shaken up this year, opening up different varieties of strategies to choose from.
The topics to be covered:
- Our Impact Last Season
- Drivers and Constructor Review
- How to Perform Well
- Money Making and Gameplay Tactics
- Team Line-up Examples
- Final Thoughts
All of the latest discussions, ideas, money making and analysis is done on our very active discord so please come join! — https://discord.gg/jVxGGTrwDG
Join our fantasy private league — https://fantasy.formula1.com/league/359
Our Impact Last Season
We’re proud to say that 2020’s winner came from our community as well as 3 of the final top 10, totalling 40%. We have also had various members enter and exit the top 10 during the course of the season with one member holding position 1 for the large part of the season. Of the 5 richest teams in the game, 4 came from us, fully utilising our money making techniques. From an issued survey of ours, 93% of users were within the top 1% of entries for the global league. 22% of partaking users being in the top 0.01% globally. These are important statistics for us as it proves that our website is working and provides the value to help improve performance.
On top of these global statistics, members from our community came 1st in the following country leader boards: Canada, Croatia, India, Isle of Man, Malaysia, Netherlands, Norway, Russia and the USA. With top 3 country positions also secured in: Sweden, United Kingdom, Greece, India and Poland.
Drivers and Constructor Review
Please see table below for my comments on drivers above, this season is special with us having more reliable data for expected performances due to the cars being more or less the same as last year. At the moment these figures below are based only on previous year’s performances, what we know about the cars at the moment and what we expect due to rumours or developments. Testing and FP1 and FP2 will be the most important in terms of discovering who is faster than who, so that will be the best time to evaluate the grid.
Numbers in green represent undervalued drivers, those are drivers who score more points than the millions they are worth, these are the most valuable assets. Numbers in red represent overvalued drivers, drivers who score less points than they are worth, these are less valuable assets.
The numbers in orange are manually adjusted numbers, based on the quality of driver that previously held their seat and what I expect the driver to achieve at the bare minimum. Vettel could very much score on average 16 points per race as well as Alonso. For Gasly, I removed his win as I don’t expect that to happen again and that heavily skews his average.
I divided the constructors value’s in half, leaving constructors that score above 1.65 points per million as the bench mark for registering as undervalued for the millions they are worth. Red Bull could very much reach even higher than 1.85 if Perez does deliver. Red Bull could then ultimately be the best constructor to pick. Aston Martin is left in the red but they suffered from quite a few issues last season, outside of those, they performed well and I would still rate them as a top mid field pick.
How to Perform Well
- Pick drivers with high average points per race, its a long season to pull points in. Trust your drivers to do well.
- Pick drivers with high value (high points per million on our “prices” page)
- Keep an eye “last 5 races” averages on our website to spot which drivers are improving, above their regular average to pick them up before others realise they’re becoming good (for example, Sainz performed amazing Russia onwards, Kimi also increased in performance from mid way through the season)
- Do not kneejerk picks if they suddenly DNF, assess whether its their fault, if its the car, or a situation out of their control and how often that would happen, focus on the averages across the long season.
- Use streaks and turbos to your advantage to maximise points.
- Increase your budget in the game so you can afford more expensive and ultimately better players, join our discord where we’re constantly on top of this with the occasional pump and dump of certain assets (We drove Haas up by quite a lot last year) —https://discord.gg/jVxGGTrwDG
- Use your megadriver when your driver is going to achieve both streaks at the same time, for example Hamilton qualifying P1, finishing P1 and achieving both qualifying and races streaks.
Money Making and Gameplay Tactics
Last year the game allowed you to infinitely change your team around between race weekends, allowing you to take advantage of sentiment changes and increase budget. This year you’ll be restricted to being able to do this once a week: 1 sub to remove driver A who you usually run for weekends, for driver B who will increase in value. Once driver B’s price rises, you can use 1 sub to exchange driver B for another driver C, who’s price is also going up, then finally use your final sub to put back Driver A for the weekend. Maximising this will be your best chance to make money in the game to afford better drivers for your weekend line ups. Our discord made a big communal effort to keep each other updated on sentiment and price movements and collective ideas on who to substitute to earn more money.
My game plan for 2020 was simple, pick high average point scoring drivers, increase budget to swap out for better average point scoring drivers and ride to the end. I decided to use my megadrive for Hamilton’s second streak, which bagged me extra points versus his first set of streaks as he performed better in the second one. I finished rank 110 due to a mistake in turbo choice for Abu Dhabi, but I peaked at rank 35 and could have finished around rank 27 if I chose the correct turbo. It’s a simple strategy nothing radical and it works.
Team Line-up Examples
Check out the Google sheets below (thanks Redacted from discord) where you can calculate the highest average points per race team, within the budget. Driver 3 is the turbo driver and is in red, which calculates fully on to the next column total (E10). In column I, the numbers in orange cells are my estimates for what I expect from certain drivers.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kWE8B6CFqHtOBSGakCfi5LtaFo24MkbQ_0tHloc3XCU/edit?usp=sharing
Here are what I believe to be the 3 strongest line-ups from what we know. Please note this is before testing and could radically change due to that as well as FP1 and FP2.
Final Thoughts
We feel like this year is going to be way more competitive than last year with the limited money making methods and the variety of strong teams you can run, eliminating the Hamilton/Mercedes stronghold on the game. It’s a lot of fun discussing theories for maximising points during the season as well as talking F1 with everyone, it really does make the F1 season that much better so please feel free to join and introduce yourself!
If you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know!
Thanks and good luck!
