Sidepodcast

Please do not forget to update your Fantasy Racers team.

How I do look forward to the Friday of a race weekend, when I get to share my latest scheme for my Fantasy Racers team.

You’ve got until 5 o’clock BST to alter your teams, which gives you a good few hours. You can even wait until after FP2 if you so desire.

Personally, I have no need to watch those drivers pootling round that track, I can make all the decisions I need based on a simple system. This week it is all the drivers whose surname falls between A and C.

Here is my team:

I predict that this will not be a strong weekend for Sidepodcast Racers, but I have faith in the arbitrary system. Anything can happen at a new track.

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Please do not forget to update your Fantasy Racers team.

Ah, it’s that time of the week again, where we must review our Fantasy Racers selections.

I have done some extensive research, and evaluated all the drivers comparitively during Free Practice 1 in Hungary. I have decided upon, drum roll please, a completely arbitrary selection. You knew that already, though, didn’t you?

Here’s mine:

My thought process this time was to pick the cheapest drivers and stack my team full of them. Discounting the Super Aguri boys (because even I’m not crazy enough to choose a driver that’s not even racing), I started at the cheapest - Sutil - and kept clicking the next most expensive driver until I ran out of cash. I’m quite annoyed I have some money left over, but I don’t want to spoil the system.

So, don’t forget to visit Fantasy Racers and update your team, or sign up if you haven’t already and want to feel the satisfaction of beating Sidepodcast Racers. Let us know what your team is in the comments, and feel free to poke fun at my selection.

Since the Sidepodcast league was set up over on Fantasy Racers, we’ve had a record number of teams enter. Although, having said that, any number would be a record for us, this being the inaugural competition and all. Still, 92 teams is nothing to be sniffed at and we owe Dan a considerable quantity of beer tokens for getting this particular ball rolling.

We may have mentioned, we love messing around with graphs and this new league contains lots of potential for stats and pie charts, but there is one metric that is most fascinating.

Presenting, Sidepodcast Fantasy Racers by Country:

I thought that F1 wasn’t popular in the US? Bernie, are you listening? To be fair, though, the UK also has an England/Scotland split as well, but where are the Welsh?

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We’ve had a few comments saying how much you liked the Fantasy Racers Sidepodcast League roll call on last week’s show. This makes me very happy because it wasn’t easy to do.

I’m sure you’re all aware we’re not afraid of a spot of editing, to keep the show running smoothly. We wanted to do the roll call in one take, no editing, because it would have felt wrong otherwise.

We can be a bit touchy feely like that.

Getting straight to the point, it took a lot of practice, and still we made mistakes. And because we’re not scared of making a fool of ourselves, I have put together a compilation of the outtakes from our numerous attempts at getting it right.

Enjoy.

Last year, we ventured into the world of Fantasy F1 by taking part in a competition on Batracer. I say “we” but of course, I didn’t have the patience to put in the hours of effort required, and I certainly wasn’t impressed when we only managed twelfth place after all the time invested. It’s not that I was taking it too seriously, but I just wanted to see more of a result for all the hard work.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about Fantasy F1 and its many different forms, and wondering whether there is one out there that takes minimal effort and simply adds that little extra element to watching a race. Just as I was about to mention it on the show and solicit opinions, Dan Cross beat me to it and posted details of a Sidepodcast league he had set up over on FantasyRacers.com.

Of course, we had to go and check it out, and I immediately set up my team “Sidepodcast Racers”. It was incredibly easy to do, sign up (email and name required only), pick a team name, pick your drivers. There’s a limited budget, obviously, but you can recruit a couple of good names to your team. My team at the moment consists of: Adrian Sutil, Sebastian Vettel, Jenson Button, Fernando Alonso and Robert Kubica.

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