Saloolas back in the lead of the predictions championship

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Only one person - Haas - predicted Alonso's pole position

The ever-close F1 Fanatic Predictions Championship has seen another change of lead with Saloolas nicking the top spot from Dougie once more.

And with Benno, brouard21, Chua, Dank, ianhaycox, Pete Walker and Sush Meerkat locked in a seven-way tie for third, this one’s going down to the wire.

The prizes

First place prize

  • An original F1 painting by Rob Ijbema
  • Five F1 DVDs from Duke Video: “Formula One 1970: The uncrowned champion”, “Formula Villeneuve: A tribute to Gilles Villeneuve”, “The World’s Greatest F1 Cars”, “Champion: Hill” and “Nine Days in Summer”
  • £60 to spend on F1 merchandise at Onpole.com

3x Runners-up prizes

This was one of our lowest-scoring rounds so far, with no-one predicting the Hamilton-Raikkonen-Webber podium exactly and only Haas correctly naming Fernando Alonso as the pole sitter.

Saloolas now has a ten-point lead over Dougie, with the chasing pack another 20 points further back. But with seven rouns left to play and 60 points on offer at each round, there’s still a lot of fight left in this title battle.

Here’s the championship standings in full:

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Author information

Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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29 comments on “Saloolas back in the lead of the predictions championship”

  1. Sush Meerkat
    30th July 2009, 7:08

    damn it, this is tense.
    Bring it on people.

    I do feel sorry for you Keith, this seems like a very complex way of doing this competition. In the break I think the fanatic readers should try to figure out a quicker way for you to do this.

    Maybe options so it does it automatically?.

    1. Good idea – I’m definitely open to any suggestions!

      1. Perhaps you could create one of those HTML form contraptions?

        http://www.phpform.org/

        1. Sush Meerkat
          30th July 2009, 20:19

          good idea Andrew, but it would have to be hard wired into our accounts, and since Keith’s site on the comments is more “add your mail” style and forgetful we will have to all help out to make the profiles more robust I guess?

          So Keith, here you go, had an idea, can we get another Ke1thFanatic to bolt on the forms into our profiles we use on the forums?

          That way our result will be hardwired into our profiles and should free up your time?.

      2. If you like Keith I don’t might creating a simple web page to collect the entries and store everything in a database. If necessary I can create an ‘admin’ function to close entries before qualifying and get it to generate the results for each round.

        If you are interested email and we’ll see if we can work something out.

  2. Great job, Keith. You never rest, did you?

    I’ve seen you don’t rank those who has the same points.

    Maybe you could do as in F1. Rank them taking in consideration the highest points they scored in each race.

    Take an example: Chua and Dank are in 3rd position but Dank has scored two times 35 points, and Chua only one. So Dank could be in 3rd and Chua in 4th. (Sorry Chua, nothing to do with you…)

    1. Maybe you could do as in F1. Rank them taking in consideration the highest points they scored in each race.

      Yep I think we’re going to have to do that s we can separate the tied drivers.

      1. My suggestion for a tie for the prizes.
        I think a better way to decide in case there is a tie for the prize places after the season ends, would be to predict how many points Schumacher scores for the rest of the season. It would spice up the competition like Schumacher will spice it up for his competitors. One choice for everyone before the Valencia race, then after the season the top four if there tied on points which looks likely, those who get it right will get bonus points. If nobody gets it right and there are still ties then the ones who predicted the most pole positions and podiums in the correct position should decide first and runner up places. Just a thought.

  3. Congratulations SaloolaS, its getting very difficult to predict now whereas before it was relatively easy, and in the last 2 rounds SaloolaS has scored very highly. The highest score this round as well.

    It’s now the real competition starts as the rest of the season will be very unpredictable, and the best predictors will come forward. Whose ready to predict Schumi for 1 win this year??

    1. Gonna be interesting in Valencia :)
      It’s a nice fight with you through the whole season :P

  4. I was never a gambling man, and predicting winds turned out rubbish. but I applaud your dedication Keith, and the competition is indeed very interesting.

    I have a suggestion, if you have us enter the driver names by a specific code, in a preset table lets say, wouldn’t it be simpler to automate it?

    1. ** Wins (obviously)not winds–that is a obscure art..

  5. Hoorah! I’m third (for the moment)! :-)

  6. Beware!!!
    I am coming on you guys, even if I wasn’t participating for the first 5 races!

  7. HounslowBusGarage
    30th July 2009, 10:30

    Keith, this is a real Herculean task. You don’t do it manually, do you?
    If it was done in a similar manner to the polls on your site, it would be easier. Visitor would be presented with dropdown menus of driver names for pole, first etc. This would stop spelling errors etc. A simple database would then receive the visitor’s Username plus four values as selected, in a specific order. Database is updated.
    After the race, points are added according to the values in the event table and totals are re-calculated.

    1. A simple web form would suffice and a database to automatically tally up the points. It would save you lots of time and also eliminate any errors in the entries. I believe your using wordpress. There should be a web form plugin you could use to do this. I used to have a website but I’m looking into setting up a blog myself.

  8. I’m slipping! :( 5 points in the last race. Oh dear. It was a toughie to predict though.

  9. I’m slipping as well, having failed to enter predictions for the Germany and Hungary due to a birthday-sized hangover and a weekend away on holiday respectively!

  10. This race had the lowest scoring since China!
    I can’t really remember what it was like in the first races that are not part of the game anymore.
    The championship has definately gotten more unpredictable and therefore more interesting.

    Hungary was a turning point in our game. I think all of us will have finally lost trust in Brawns, as they have now had a streak of non-winning races and don’t look like being capable of winning races anymore.

    It’d be interesting to see how much trust will the players have for Hamilton and McLaren in the next race, as well as for the new joker in the game – Michael Schumacher.

    1. [The Brawns] don’t look like being capable of winning races and/or scoring podiums anymore.

  11. Andrew White
    30th July 2009, 13:11

    If only I had been around to make my prediction for the German race… I could have been a contender :(

    Ah well, I’m not completely out of it yet

    1. Sorry to hear that Andrew – remember you can email predictions in if it makes it easier.

  12. Keith,
    Just wanted to check. The current placings list shows that I received 0 points for Hungary. However, I thought I had picked as follows: Ham – Pole, Race: Ham, Vet, Web. Don’t I get points for first and third? Thanks

  13. Keith,

    Yes, I looked back on the Hungary GP predictions thread and I am shown as follows:

    Leaf
    Ham
    Ham
    Vet
    Web

    I know I’m not in contention with the guys at the front of the grid, but I do enjoy the predictions competition.
    Keep up the good work.
    Leaf

    1. Yes, you are quite right – you are actually equal 99th on 80 points having scored 25 at Hungary.

      The reason for the mistake was because of how you’d written out your entry – I do ask people to use drivers’ surnames. If they haven’t, I try to correct them, but I must have overlooked yours.

      As a lot of people on here have suggested, using a form would be a much better way of doing this. I’m not sure how to set one up, unfortunately, but if someone can do an example (perhaps using a plugin as Austin suggests) I’ll try to get it in place for the next round.

    1. On friday before the race there is an article for predictions – you just enter a comment with saying your prediction

  14. thank god the FIA doesn’t run this championship! i got points on my debut btw!!!

  15. keith you are just one place above me.next race,i’m gonna fly past you

Comments are closed.