Here’s a guest article from Gavin Brown, otherwise known as RubberGoat on Twitter and author of the F1 statistics blog, Making Up The Numbers.

I like numbers. I like them almost as much as I like F1 … which is a heck of a lot. I’ve been a fan for almost 25 years now and 2012 is looking to be a very interesting season with no clear-cut favourites. Most of the posts written on my blog are about analysing lap time data to compare strategies. But I also play a few different Fantasy F1 games, so when I was offered the chance to have a look at the statistics behind the BadgerGP game, I was very keen to have a look at the data.

Now, before I do, I should point out a couple of things. Firstly, I won’t be looking at who scored the most points or who was the best combination to have… because that would spoil the fun and make it too easy. Secondly, the data sent to me makes no reference to player or team names, so it’s completely anonymous. I can see who was picked, but not by whom…

Now that we’ve had a couple of races, the BadgerGP Fantasy GP game is getting into full swing. You only have a week left to make your ‘free’ changes so you had better make your picks count!

But who are you picking? Note that because the stats are anonymous I can’t see which team picked who, so I decided to average out all of the picks for these numbers.

No surprise that on average, Button has come out on top here. Di Resta features highly because he seems to be everyone’s second or third choice driver. You might be a bit surprised to see some of the drivers lower or higher than expected over the two races though – Perez and Raikkonen feature quite highly, while Massa and Schumacher were very seldom picked.

What about the teams?

I think the top two teams here are your first choice picks, while Force India and Caterham are your second and third choice picks. Ferrari are very far down the order (probably due to all the scares from testing), but Mercedes are surprisingly low too.

The good people at the Sett also thought it might be interesting to see what picks were changed after the Australian Grand Prix – as it’s probably safe to assume most of you made your picks based on last year’s form or from testing. So how did the driver and team picks change?

 

Seems like a lot of you make your picks based on recent form – you are only as good as your last race, or so the saying goes… Therefore loads of you decided to pick Button, Perez & Maldonado and you ran away from Vettel & Di Resta in droves (yet Di Resta still features quite strongly in your picks).

 

Again, loads of love for McLaren, Williams & Sauber after Australia – sounds like a solid choice of first, second and third team choices to me. Like myself, you were disappointed in Caterham’s poor form, see Red Bull not as strong as 2011 and think Force India may struggle in a competitive midfield this year.

As part of the competition, you are also asked to pick the pole, top 3 finishers and fastest lap for each race. Below are the percentage of teams who got at least one individual prediction correct:

Seems like everyone did really well in Australia, but the randomness of Malaysia skews the results a lot. It does indicate that while Australia was action packed, it was result that was expected by a lot of people.

What is interesting is that people were picking Karthikeyan and Kobayashi for wins and fastest laps, yet nobody picked Perez. The amount of teams who picked Alonso for a win is also very low – 15 out of nearly 5000!

So I hope that this post has given you an idea of what the Fantasy GP game is like – it’s lots of fun, and like the rest of Badger GP, really encourages you to get involved. I have been told that a large majority of the teams are British, but I have also seen that there are teams from the USA, Venezuela, Australia, Spain, Singapore, Germany, Canada and many others.

Have fun with your picks and best of luck for the Chinese Grand Prix in just less than a weeks time!