F1 fantasy league anyone?

[ZfrkS62]

I don't know how it is around the rest of the world, but here in the US fantasy sports leagues are pretty popular.

As i understand it, you pick a certain number of players from various actual teams to form your fantasy team.
You get points depending on how your players do when they play each week (or day if you're playing baseball)

I was just curious to see who out there would be interested in setting up a JW Fantasy F1 league. It will probably take some effort to set up the scoring system and have everything agreed upon.

Let me know what you all think and if the reaction is positive i'll start drawing up rules and guidelines for it. (and no i won't pull a Mosley and change the rules every year!)

[sameerrao]

I will be interested for sure. My thoughts on this ...

There are two ways of going about this

1. Pre-pick a team - like what you mentioned above ... the trick is to make it difficult to pick both a dominant player or team - E.g. Michael + Ferrari.

One possible twist is that keep Ferrari out of the equation for the first 5 races or so. Meaning you cant start with team with either Ferrari driver or car. So go with someone else and earn points as your team/drivers score. After you have earned X points (keep this high) you can then substitute one of your drivers/car for Schumi/Ferrari.

The only reason I suggest this is that otherwise everyone will want either Schumi or Ferrari. It'll be boring....

2. Go by pure race prediction
Predict the top three qualifiers and top 6 finishers in every race with points for guessing right.

#1 and #2 could be done together or whichever one makes more sense. We can hammer thru all the nuances to get this working right.

I assume that this would be for the next season right?

[mindgam3]

aren't the way fantasy leagues work though is that you have a certain amount of points to spend and obviously better drivers have more points attached to them. So say you picked schumacher as one of ur drivers, because there are so many points assigned to having him in ur team, ur other two or how ever many others we are having would have to be lesser drivers say from minardi or jordan.

I'm very up for this league, but i think it will take a lot of organising and work to get together

[ZfrkS62]

yeah, i think it would be asking a bit much to start this now with only 2 races left

what i was thinking was that we would have to set up some sort of random drawing or a fair way of determining who would get to pick their first driver. then the next person picks their first driver and so on until everyone has their first driver. then for the second driver pick, the order is reversed, I.E. the first person to pick in the first round, now picks last in the second round. and then the third round for the third driver would be the original order, and 4th round would be to pick the cars and that would go in reverse order.

and to solve the Ferrari/Schumi combination, you can't pick the car that is driven by one of your drivers. Therefore we could see Fisichella in a Williams, R. Schumacher in a Minardi and Coulthard in a Ferrari.

I like the idea of fueling this by prediction. How about scoring half points for improvement from Qualifying to Final classification? 1 improved spot = .5 point?
might make it a bit more interesting

[mindgam3]

i think if we just assigned points to drivers then we wouldnt have to pick in turns because some people would go for one top driver and two lesser, or 3 middle ranked drivers or maybe one slightly higher, one average and one poorer driver. The chances of getting the same combination along with the same combination of team(s) is kinda slim. Maybe tyres too? Just working out the points system will be the hard part

[ZfrkS62]

yeah, i figured the points system would be the tricky part, kinda why i wanted to get some input from everyone else.

I've never been interested in fantasy sports until i had this idea so i'm not sure if that's how it works, mindgam3; but i think that might actually make it even more strategical. if we did it that way we would have to base it off of the final WDC and WCC standings at the end of the season. But that rasies the question of how we are going to rank incoming drivers? If they've raced this year it won't be hard but what about anyone coming up from F3000 or out of a test seat?

i like the idea of introducing the tires too...we'll have to keep that in mind for when we go to finalize everything. maybe another .5 point for the tires?

[mindgam3]

Well this is a VERY rough example, but say you had 500 points to spend, you could pick a combination any of drivers with a maximum of 3 drivers and you cannot exede 500 points. So for instance if u chose schumacher, you would only have 200 points to buy 1 or 2 lesser drivers.

Maybe it could be based on 800 points and this included 3 drivers and 2 teams and then u pick one or the other tyre manufacturer?

As i said this is a very rough example and the points would have to be based on how good we think the drivers will do next year taking into account their team too.

Michael Schumacher - 300

Rubens Barrichello - 270

Jenson Button - 250

Fernando Alonso - 245

Jarno Trulli - 230

Juan Pablo Montoya - 200

Kimi Räikkönen - 200

Takuma Sato - 180

David Coulthard - 160

Giancarlo Fisichella - 150

Ralf Schumacher - 190

Felipe Massa - 140

Mark Webber - 150

Olivier Panis - 120

Antonio Pizzonia - 150

Christian Klien - 110

Cristiano da Matta - 105

Nick Heidfeld - 110

Timo Glock - 105

Zsolt Baumgartner - 105

[ZfrkS62]

yes..that actually sounds like an implementable system. (you seem to have a knack for posting responses while i'm typing ops: )

as i mentioned above though, how would we classify the worth of an incoming driver?

I think that if we held it to 3 drivers and 1 team that would make it a bit more challenging. that way no one can pick a high ranked team and low ranked team in an effort to double their points take in a weekend.

and the higher ranked teams/drivers earn less points than the lower ranks...kind of an encouragement to root for the under dogs.

maybe we should think about different difficulty levels for the lesser educated F1 fans in the forum too. (3 drivers 1 team for the more involved fans; 3 drivers 2 teams for the average fan; 3 drivers 3 teams for the novices) of course that would also include point system variations for each level as well.

[sameerrao]

^^^ Count me in as a novice ... What does F1 stand for? Anyone?? Anyone??

[mindgam3]

hehe yeah i think it would be kinda hard to distinquish the novice from the pro n will make it even more complicated that it probably will be. Most people who are going to take part will know a lot about F1 anyway

[ZfrkS62]

just a thought. we would have to make them declare what level they wanted. I'm just trying to figure out ways to appeal to all the F1 fans. even if they just got into it this year

[ZfrkS62]

One thing that struck me today is what site to use for points distribution. News will influence decisions that are made and i don't want people to complain that one site reported something different than another site and they ended up getting screwed. I was thinking that F1racing.net would be a good site. they have it in a bunch of different languages so that should appeal to the people who do not use english as their primary language. And they update the news section fairly often.

anyone else use a different site?

[Toronto]

well i think it would be best to start this next season.

[ZfrkS62]

yeah that was the plan. I was hoping to get everything sorted out so that everyone could pick their teams about 2 or 3 weeks before the Australian GP.

This is too big to throw together in 2 weeks. But so far i'm a bit disappointed that it's only you, sameearo and myself that have expressed interest in this.

but then again, it may not pick up speed unti it gets organised.

[Toronto]

for anyone that wants to start in fantasy f1
there is this site http://www.fantasy-f1.net/new_user.asp