F1 Fantasy 2023 Guide
2023 will be the 5th season of the F1 Fantasy game and will have the biggest changes in terms of how the game works and the drivers on track. It has been another great year in terms of the F1 Fantasy Tracker community, our reach and results. I decided to wait a day before writing this blog as there were a lot of changes and it was important we, as a group, understood the rules and agreed on the initial meta. I’ll try my best to articulate my thoughts and reasons while trying to be concise in giving you a guide to selecting the best teams for this season.
Topics to be covered:
- F1 Fantasy Tracker Last Season Review
- Post Testing Review
- F1 Fantasy Game
-New Rules
-How to Perform Well - F1 Fantasy Team Builder Tool (NEW AND RELEASED)
- Teams I’m Running
- Our Leagues & Final Thoughts
As mentioned every year, not all of these ideas and theories are mine, we have a lot of discussions of performances and analysis being produced all the time in our Discord by our amazing and passionate members. Personally I think its a great place to hang out to talk F1 and watch the races together, without any bias, I do recommend joining! — https://discord.gg/f1fantasytracker
EDIT
I’ve just posted a new blog post as a guideline on how to use our F1 Fantasy Team Builder. Click the link to visit the tool, and find the blog post here — https://medium.com/f1fantasytracker/f1-fantasy-team-builder-b62186f3a560
F1 Fantasy Tracker Last Season Review
With a very turbulent season of F1 with no historic data on the new cars, we always new this season would be more difficult than others. Unfortunately we were not able to win the 2022 global league this year, however we still got 4 people into the top 10, including 3rd place overall!
Alongside the global league, we were able to win 7 country leagues such as Belgium, Germany, France and India as well as producing top 3 positions 12 more times in countries like Canada, Italy and Finland. An interesting note is that all of the top 3 in Belgium were from our community.
One of the biggest draws to fantasy games is private leagues between friends and placing bets or prize pools for users to win. We were able to help win 135 private leagues with our analysis and stats and the result of this is members winning collectively over $14,000 USD.
A massive congratulations to everyone's success last season and it’s really rewarding to not only hear your results but also see the impact we’ve had and hear the kind words everyone has had, it doesn’t go unnoticed!
Post Testing Review
The benefit of this season versus last season is that we now have some sort of reliable data to look back on, we understand the pecking order. However due to F1’s rules about diminishing wind tunnel and CFD time depending on your success, we can start to imagine how the grid will develop.
I won’t elaborate too much on things that are already out in the news cycle or rumour mill because ultimately, it’s about waiting until FP3 to really understand the current pecking order. However I will note down some thoughts I have on the grid.
Aston Martin
It’s no secret that they’ve impressed a lot of people from their pre-season testing race and qualifying paces as well as tyre wear. In the hands of Alonso I have no doubt he’ll do well this year. Another fact to consider is that Aston Martin performed badly last year, so their aerodynamic development time is at 100% usage for their 2023 car whereas the WCC champion’s Red Bull, are reduced down to 70% aerodynamic development time and that’s before taking into consideration their financial penalty from last year. Obviously the lower you finish the more time you get given, but the important fact to note is that if Aston Martin are “up there” and competing with your Ferraris and Mercedes with a whole lot more development time in their pocket to develop over the season… we could be in for some interesting developments!
Red Bull
That being said, unless something wild happens, I do expected a Red Bull 1–2 WDC and Red Bull WCC which makes half of your fantasy team line ups very easy to decide.
Overall I don’t think the grid will be shaken up that much, other than the afore mentioned, maybe Nyck de Vries really out performing Yuki Tsunoda might be a possibility that’s being overlooked, Haas having two good drivers and a car that is capable of being in the midfield is a possibility and honestly, Zhou Guanyu isn’t as bad as I expected him to be, I’d put him on par with Bottas and I think that Alfa Romeo car and pairing is very nice. Before locking in any team line up you have, always wait for FP3 results for the best guide to who is going to perform best that race!
F1 Fantasy Game
New Features
If you don’t already know, the official F1 Fantasy game has changed platforms, from being run by PlayOn to now being run by F1 themselves, with this came new features and rules to how fantasy points are scored, some you will be familiar with but others less so. I’ll note any changes, new features and draw comparisons if applicable while condensing the new rules.
2 Constructors — Teams are now 5 drivers and 2 constructors.
Dynamic Pricing — Has been removed and F1 will be updating prices the Monday following races manually (as far as we know).
No Streaks— Streaks are now removed from the game.
DRS Boost — This scores 2x points on any driver. Last year this was “Turbo” and was limited to drivers under $20.0m, this year ANY driver can be DRS Boosted.
Chips — These are effectively power ups you can use on your teams and each chip has a different feature. You are limited to using each once per season.
Autopilot Chip — This selects your DRS Boost for you and chooses your highest performing driver of that race to receive your 2x boost, meaning you won’t ever miss making sure you got the best choice.
Extra DRS Boost Chip — This gives a 3x multiplier for a driver of your choice, this is effectively what the Megadriver feature was last season.
No Negative Chip — This stops your drivers and constructors from scoring less than 0 for that race weekend, useful if you want to go risky.
Wildcard Chip — Gives you unlimited changes to your team until the next team-lock.
Limitless Chip — Unlimited transfers and no cost cap for that race weekend.
Final Fix Chip — Allows you to make 1 change to your team between qualifying and the race. Keeping points from that driver you had in qualifying also.
New Point Scoring Rules
Alongside these new features is a host of new rules for point scoring. The bulk of the point scoring rules can be found here — https://fantasy.formula1.com/en/game-rules but some things to highlight are:
Beat Teammate — These numbers were super valuable last season, making sure you pick the better of the two teammates to score maximum points, this got removed this season.
Constructor Scoring — Constructors now receive points based on how many of their drivers reach Q2 and further. Constructors will also score points based on who had the fastest pitstop.
Overtakes — It is now 1 point per overtake but critically, an overtake only counts when it is on track and legal, a driver passed through a pitstop does not count
Driver of the day — Now scores 10 points for driver only, high impact and not able to predict.
How to Perform Well
1 thing really glaring to me is the constructor qualifying points. If you had to choose between 2 Q2 drivers versus 1 Q3 and 1 Q1 driver, it pays off massively if the constructor you have has as many Q3 drivers as possible. Another emphasis for the constructors is the pitstop times, 5 and 3 points really accumulate over the season if your 2nd constructor is consistently there.
When using https://www.f1fantasytracker.com/’s overview table on the home page, there are 2 metrics I put above all when trying to decide between drivers or influence my swaps, they are:
Highest Average Points — Very straight forward metric but if you are caught between 2 drivers, pick the one that scores the most on average, even if the other driver has a 1 off good race, its a long season to collect points and that’s where it matters. Alongside this, I look at last 5 race average, this helps me pick up on any driver that has been improving on performance recently but this isn’t reflected in their whole season average, this’ll help you pick up on trends quicker and make those critical swaps faster.
Points per Million — Aka value, you want the driver who have the best bang for your buck, especially in a game that's restricted by budget. this’ll allow you maximise your funds, we share these values on our Prices page.
F1 Fantasy Team Builder Tool
Our F1 Fantasy Team Builder aims to be the most comprehensive way in calculating the best scoring F1 Fantasy teams, at any selected budget, using every data point from the most up to date sessions. As of writing this blog we are able to calculate the best teams using the 2022 F1 results and we have calculated data points using 2023 testing however as the season progresses you’ll be able to select the 2023 season which will be with the most up to date data. Using this tool you’ll be able to out preform your rivals in the most statistical and comprehensive way, eventually winning your leagues! Check it out here — https://www.f1fantasytracker.com/team-builder.html
I have also posted another blog post as a guideline on how to best use — https://medium.com/f1fantasytracker/f1-fantasy-team-builder-b62186f3a560
Teams I’m Running
Here I’ll show the 3 teams I’m running to start the season off. You can see I’m following a lot of ideas I’ve written here. However I’ll annotate below each team line up my reasons if anything stands out.
Our Leagues & Final Thoughts
Leagues
I’d first like to give a massive shout out to our long time merchandise partner Fueler Store for our continued partnership, if you’re looking for F1 merch, click the link for a 10% discount code.
We decided this year to host our prized league on a different platform, we chose Fantrax as Fantrax gives us the ability to customise our point scoring system and with our experience we went for something both basic and keeps the game competitive at all stages despite DNFs or missing races. Our prize pool is just under 500 euros of coupons for F1 merchandise at Fueler Store as follows:
1st Place — 175 Euro Coupon
2nd Place — 100 Euro Coupon
3rd Place — 70 Euro Coupon
4th Place — 60 Euro Coupon
5th Place — 45 Euro Coupon
If you would like to compete for these prizes:
Please sign up to Fantrax at — http://www.fantrax.com/f1ft
Then join our Fantrax league here — https://www.fantrax.com/newui/fantasy/joinLeague.go?leagueId=mli6xioelcrxjh0z
If you would like to join our private league on the official F1 Fantasy platform, please follow this link — https://fantasy.formula1.com/en/leagues/join/P1OVWUUNJ06
Final Thoughts
Stay tuned for the “Wind Tunnel” project coming on the 28th of February. In terms of the game I think the meta is pretty set in stone purely because of the bad pricing decisions by F1, triple RB and at least double AM is the only way to go. Especially because AM is criminally undervalued, once the season kicks off I predict a big chunk of budget being rewarded for having these picks from the start.
I say this every year, but the Discord community we’ve manage to create really enhance not only F1 Fantasy but also F1 as a whole, with live race chats where you can see user’s fantasy seasons end with risky picks or have members vote on your fantasy team line ups. It really does add a lot to the sport and we’ve even had the chance to meet members at various grand prix so it’s a great place to be! Obviously no bias.. If you are interested in joining our Discord, we very much welcome you to join here — https://discord.gg/f1fantasytracker.
I think because of this being the 2nd season of the new regulations, exciting driver line ups and a whole new set of F1 Fantasy scoring, this is going to be an exciting season. If you have any questions please get in touch via Medium, Instagram or our Discord. I look forward to meeting you!
Good luck :)
