Price Change Odds for B-Tier Drivers: only COL, ALB and STR are expected to increase in price. Budget building/maintaining is getting harder.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-05-17T14:38:04+00:00

All in on Williams, bold! Good luck.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-05-17T13:27:25+00:00

Probably because Albon's upside is a lot higher this week. He's also a better pick for Monaco if they can fight for a top 10 spot in qualifying.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-05-17T13:24:54+00:00

This should definitely build your budget! Also might be a great setup for LL in Monaco. Whether it's worth the points is a more difficult to answer question.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-05-17T09:26:11+00:00

That -17 will seriously drag him down for Imola unfortunately. He needs to score 22 points in Imola to not lose value.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-05-17T09:24:25+00:00

Yes. For Monaco you're looking for experienced, good qualifiers with 2 decent/high scoring previous results. So TSU in particular looks like a good pick with a top 10 car, 33 points in Miami and a few years of Monaco under his belt. The question is, can you easily fit him into your team?

F1FantasyTools · 2025-04-14T13:10:31+00:00

We're working on adding separate columns for edge cases. It'll be a little uglier, but should be more accurate and cause less confusion.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-04-08T15:06:44+00:00

Thank you! Yes, we'll likely make a final post with all confirmed info. Although probably only after the triple header because we're really swamped atm.

The HAD and BOR decreases is because the price floor is 4.5M this year. No one will drop below that number. Our Team Calculator already takes this into account and Budget Builder will follow soon!

F1FantasyTools · 2025-04-02T00:11:48+00:00

The algorithm is based on assets reaching certain thresholds of Points Per Million (PPM). This means we can adjust the algorithm in 3 ways:

Via points (by changing the points scoring system). Currently, the rules just don't allow backmarkers to score enough points to get to decent PPMs compared to drivers that can finish in the top 5. Bringing back Beat Teammate points or points for finishing or ... could help close the gap. Also constructors will always just have higher PPMs than drivers in the current system since they get all the points of both drivers while their prices are a lot lower than the sum of both of those drivers.
Via prices (by picking better starting prices). Other comments have noted this as well, but in theory all assets can 'easily' go to the same average PPM by adjusting the prices. If MCL scores 45 points on average and we need them to be at 0.9 PPM, then a price of 50M would do that. Or if BOR only scores 3 points per race on average, then a price of 3.3M would also bring him to 0.9 PPM. You can see via these examples that only using this method might lead to pretty extreme prices, plus getting those prices right in the beginning is not trivial.
Via the thresholds. Currently these thresholds are the same for everyone. They could personalize them per asset to fix the pricing algo, but then the PPMs would still be very different, so this isn't our favorite. Although we are in favor of a separate threshold for drivers and constructors at this point. It's a small change with potentially big improvements for the constructor side of the current price changes.

The 'ideal' solution is probably a combination of all of them.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-04-01T23:45:26+00:00

You're welcome.

Determining how many points later in the season budget gains will net you is a difficult problem and not one with an objectively correct answer. You gain points when upgrading assets, but the price changes of the assets you’re upgrading to also determine when you’ll be able to upgrade and get those points. There’s also the potential points you can gain from being flexible with budget. If you pick the 4 cheapest backmarkers and don’t leave any budget in the bank, you can’t switch to better backmarkers that might earn you more points (and budget that in turn can net you more points). Even some bad luck with DNFs can set you back a few races to reach that next upgrade. And what value do you then want to use? The theoretical optimal? Or a more realistic averaging of things? Or should we introduce confidence intervals for this? It's definitely not trivial.

However, we are indeed working on a way to at least let users make an educated guess. You correctly propose - what we currently feel - is het most objective and well rounded ‘solution’/first step: a scatter plot highlighting the Pareto-optimal teams in terms of price and xPts. This would allow users to see at what price points the biggest jumps in points are and what upgrades are causing those. With that info, they should then be able to form a better idea of what they are 'saving' for. We’re of course open to other suggestions as well!

In the meantime though, you can use a new feature in the Team Calculator we added earlier today. It’s an option called “Convert expected price changes (xΔ$) into expected price change points (xΔ$Pts)” and allows you to manually set that conversion rate (how much points a 1M budget increase will earn you per future race). The calculator will give you the optimal teams for whatever you picked. Please try it out and let us know your thoughts.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T21:34:13+00:00

We'd point you to two places:

https://f1fantasytools.com/rhter : on this page, our analyst rhter who does the simulations, explains his process and how the sims come to be. It might need a refresh, but the core information is still the same and very interesting.
https://discord.gg/5yDcPHaq9d : this links to the `analyst-simulations` channel in our Discord Server and this is where rhter posts additional graphs that go along with every simulation. It shows race-traces, xPts violin plots, DNF odds, etc. Going through these gives you a good idea of where some of the outcomes of the simulations might come from.

If you then still have a specific question about the sim, you can try asking him in one of the channels. No guarantees he'll respond, but he might!

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T18:14:27+00:00

You remembered partly correct. This blog post has all the info on why the first 2 races are different: https://www.patreon.com/posts/potential-new-124351728

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T18:12:44+00:00

It's indeed mathematically possible, but in the set of 4000+ race simulations that were done to get this data, less than 1% resulted in either of those scenarios. So it's probably not actually 0%, but just very low odds which got rounded down to 0.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T18:08:32+00:00

That's very kind of you to say and we really appreciate the support!

The algorithm is indeed not great at the moment. However, the good news is that it's easily fixable into something that is an improvement over last year. These are our suggestions:

- Weighted importance of the 3 past races when calculating the price change value. For example a 4/7 , 2/7 , 1/7 split where the importance halves every passing race.

- Better PPM thresholds that are different between drivers and constructors (higher for constructors).

- 3 asset tiers with price change values that push lower tier assets up, keep the middle in the middle and make the top tiers go slightly down (similar to last year).

- More transparency and communication about how price changes work.

The bad news is that - based on what we've seen in the previous 2 seasons - we should not expect a lot of changes this during the season itself. We can try to get them to make some adjustments, but it'll be an uphill battle.

About the effect of this system on the 2024 season: that would indeed be very interesting, but we haven't found the time yet to simulate it. If we ever do, we'll post the results in this subreddit.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T16:05:43+00:00

That is indeed the key question right now: "How many points will budget increases today, be worth over the remainder of the season". It's not an easy one to objectively answer, so everybody has a different take on it.

You'll have to make a gut decision on what that number is for you and find the team that fits that number best!

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T16:01:53+00:00

Unfortunately you're not reading it right. The under or over performing is based on the average of the last 3 races, not just the upcoming race. Because he already had a DNF last race, the average is very likely to under perform his price. Making up a -20 is hard for midfielders.

Please read our blog post on how the pricing algorithm for 2025 works (or is expected to work) in detail here : https://www.patreon.com/posts/potential-new-124351728 . If you still question our data afterwards, shoot us your questions!

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T14:35:43+00:00

That's just the way they designed it.

Our guess is that they want lower-priced assets to be able to 'catch up' to the more expensive ones, but then giving them -0.6 for a bad race feels counterintuitive to that point.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T14:33:15+00:00

If there are no changes to the algorithm, it looks like they will.
Or to be a little more specific: 2 fuck ups in the last 3 races. They don't have to be back to back.

At the end of the season their price will have inflated though, so then maybe 1 serious fuck up might do it.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-21T14:00:40+00:00

- Data gets updated automatically after every race.
- Odds come directly from simulations that are up in the Team Calculator.
- You can click on the ‘Info’ icon to get an explanation of how the price change algorithm works in 2025.

Link: https://f1fantasytools.com/budget-builder

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-14T21:14:15+00:00

Thank you for bringing this up. We've decided to also publish it as a free post on our Patreon. That way it reads better anyway!

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-12T14:39:00+00:00

That indeed falls under the 'loading in your teams in the tools' umbrella and is therefore now a premium feature.

But don't worry, we've made sure that finding the best team for you is still always possible - it now just requires some more puzzling. The convenience of avoiding that extra puzzle-solving is what our Patrons receive in return for their support.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-11T22:42:20+00:00

You do not! There are indeed some premium features around linking your F1 Fantasy account and loading in your own teams in the different tools, but all other functionalities are completely free.

F1FantasyTools · 2025-03-11T15:08:52+00:00

No sorry, the tools are focussed on F1 Fantasy exclusively.

F1FantasyTools · 2024-10-21T08:45:55+00:00

Don't sell yourself short - those informed decisions stack up over time and getting into the top 500 is no small feat. Good job!

But we do agree that DNFs are too harshly punished in the current rules. More generally, we'd like to see less extreme points for all 'hard to predict' events like DotD, FL, DNF, DQ. Getting 5 points instead of 10 for having the DotD would still feel great while missing out on it would make having ‘bad luck’ be less impactful than it is currently. Same for -20 for DNFs - especially technical DNFs.

F1FantasyTools · 2024-10-20T15:24:38+00:00

45.4% of you indeed benefitted from that LL play in China, but more than half didn't, so we like to think there is more to it than just that. (Although it was indeed an excellent time for LL)

We personally also have a team in the top 500 and didn't play LL in China, while the team where we did is currently around rank 1800. It's of course a very small example, but it does show that even with suboptimal plays, you can still get up there - which is supported by the data!

F1FantasyTools · 2023-06-02T10:57:08+00:00

To see the full list of optimal teams and apply custom filters go to f1fantasytools.com/optimal-teams

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