SofaF1

Refuelling has been banned for this season in an attempt to make the racing more exciting (as well as other reasons). Cars will no longer be able to wait behind a lower fuelled car, overtaking them through the pit-stops. Whether this is good or bad is yet to be seen. However, another reason for the rule change was to make qualifying less complicated. Fans wanted to know who was fasted on Saturday, but often they wouldn’t find out until lap 20 on race day. Ok, but now, announced today, was an extra rule change that seems to negate the whole thing: the top ten drivers will have to start the race on the same tyres they qualified with. Strategy comes back in to play, and we won’t know until half way through Sunday who was really fastest on Saturday.

Teams have been coming and going. Drivers have been swapping back and forth and so far nothing has upset the peaceful tranquil that is the sofaF1 site. Until now!

They’ve only gone and changed the points system!

Actually it doesn’t make much of a difference. They have essentially done this for money reasons rather than sporting ones. There are going to be 13 teams next year and they new teams need to get on the score board or they’ll go bust.

So they’ve extended the points down to tenth place and to do this they’ve made a win a substantially larger 25 points. However don’t be fooled the all important ratio of “how many second places equals a first place” is unchanged.

The ratios are pretty stable all the way down as you can see:

The only real anomoly that I can see is the strange points gap between 6-8th. There shouldn’t be more of a gap between 7th and 8th than there is between 6th and 7th.

However, other than this, there has been very little change. This means that it has made hardly any difference to the positions from last year for the drivers and actually zero difference to the constrictors. (essentially it makes a difference only if you routinely finished it ninth or tenth)

Thanks to Pat from Too Much Racing for doing the maths on this:

1. Button 230.5
2. Vettel 203
3. Barrichello 183
4. Webber 175
5. Hamilton 120.5
6. Raikkonen 119
7. Trulli 78 (the first order change, was 8th)
8. Rosberg 75.5 (was 7th)
9. Glock 63.5 (was 10th)
10. Alonso 62 (was 9th)

1. Brawn 413.5
2. RBR 378
3. Ferrari 170
4. McLaren 166.5
5. Toyota 149.5
6. BMW 88
7. Williams 80.5
8. Renault 63
9. FIF1 36
10. STR 22.5

So where does that leave the sofaF1 championship? Well my guess is that we should have to predict the top 10. It seems a pretty reasonable, if not slightly daunting prospect.

But maybe you think things should be different? Let us know in the comments before the soFIA conduct our pre-season drinks / council meeting.

I guess most of you saw the race, so I won’t bother commenting too much on it, but the circuit looked awesome on television, hopefully we will hear all about it from Fourstar when he gets back.

So cut to the chase, good effort Pete!

Round 17

Pete 8
Rod 6
Igor 6
Mr C 5
Bearded Stew 5
Aitch 5
LB22 5
Christine 4
Nick 4
Alex 4
GrifF1 4
Mo Joker 4
Fourstar 3
PatW 3
Lou 3
RG 1
Jackie 1
Takuya 1
Sean 1
Adi Brown 1
Piqued 0
Jeremy 0

Which would have left the championship looking like this…

Igor 90
Mr C 86
Nick 86
Aitch 79
Alex 73
Bearded Stew 73
PatW 72
Rod 69
Christine 66
GrifF1 62
Lou 56
Pete 54
Fourstar 48
Jackie 48
Sean 45
RG 38
Takuya 38
Piqued 25
Jeremy 18

… However way back when some of us predicted how the championship would end up, some people didn’t but posted for the first race and so automatically inherited those predictions for the championship too, and some people joined too late and missed out on the bonus points. I couldn’t find the official ruling on this so I preceded anyway and have awarded the following …

Mr C 10
RG 10
Igor 10
Aitch 8
Nick 6
Jackie 6
Pete 6
Fourstar 4
Piqued 4
Christine 4
Rod 4
Bearded Stew 4
Alex 2
Jeremy 0
GrifF1 0
Takuya 0
PatW 0
Lou 0
Sean 0

Which leaves the final SofaF1 Championship 2009 standings looking like this…

Igor 100
Mr C 96
Nick 92
Aitch 87
Bearded Stew 77
Alex 75
Rod 73
PatW 72
Christine 70
GrifF1 62
Pete 60
Lou 56
Jackie 54
Fourstar 52
RG 48
Sean 45
Takuya 38
Piqued 29
Jeremy 18

These results are believed to be correct at the time of going to press, but feel free to feedback any legitimate challenges and they may or may not be considered.

Congratulations Igor, thanks for joining in everyone, especially Jeremy who seemed to have abandoned the legendary prediction device at the end there despite his valiant efforts to make it work all season long.

Keep the sofa warm over the winter, there is bound to be something happening here before March 2010!

So this is it the grand finale. The actual season may not be going down to the wire, but as usual the Pole Poll is. Mr C stumbled at the last race, can he pull it back? Will Nick take the win for the first time or will he get second place for the third year in a row (Nick Heidfeld like consistency there). Or will this be the second time in a row that the person enjoying their second year of Pole Polling takes the win. Fourstar went from rookie in 2007 to winner in 2008, Igor was a rookie last year, could he be the one to be crowned 2009 SofaF1 Pole Poll Champion?

What do you need to do? It’s simple just give us your prediction, one last time this year, of who the pole sitter will be, and who the top eight will be in the race.

The predictions will be carefully combined with your predictions at the beginning of the season by Bearded Stew and we shall get our championship results!

Thanks to everyone for taking part this year, it has been fun, and an especial thanks to Stew for keeping up with the results with everything that’s been going on for him.

The championship clincher! Jenson gathers enough points from his 5th place to take the championship with one race to go. Great result for both him and Brawn who seal the constructors title also. Quite an incredible feat since the team were pretty much by the F1 wayside days before the season started. It might sound like a cliché but this has been a career defining season for Jenson, who was basically out of a job and in danger of becoming known in the history books as a nearly man. Ok his points have tailed off a bit late in the season but delivering those early wins set him up nicely.

Talking of nearly men, arguably the unluckiest man in F1, Webber too really had to deliver this season and elevated himself to double grand prix winner. Again remarkable achievement considering his broken leg over last winter season.

Anyway, sorry for the delay, just a few hours to go before the final race of the season gets under way in Abu Dhabi, but the results after Brazil look like this …

Round 16

Alex 6
PatW 6
RG 5
Jackie 5
Igor 5
GrifF1 4
Bearded Stew 4
Takuya 4
Nick 3
Rod 3
Aitch 3
Fourstar 2
Piqued 2
Jeremy 2
Mr C 1
Christine 1
Pete 1
Lou 0
Sean 0

Championship

Igor 84
Nick 82
Mr C 81
Aitch 74
Alex 69
PatW 69
Bearded Stew 68
Rod 63
Christine 62
GrifF1 58
Lou 53
Jackie 47
Pete 46
Fourstar 45
Sean 44
RG 37
Takuya 37
Piqued 25
Jeremy 18

So it’s getting very very close to the final curtain. But what will be the deciding factor? If Lewis scores another pole then he will be level pegging with Jenson over the season and that could mean a lot of points for people.

It seems like a long time since Japan somehow, but you must remember what to do by now. Predict the Pole sitter, and the top eight finishers for the race.

And the entries close when qualifying starts (not at 1pm!). This week qualifying starts at 6pm. So get those entries in, and good luck!

Suzuka: Cool track, its good to be back.

Round 15

Bearded Stew 8
PatW 8
Aitch 7
Pete 6
Rod 5
Christine 4
Takuya 4
Fourstar 3
Nick 3
Alex 3
Igor 3
Lou 3
Sean 3
Mr C 2
Jackie 2
GrifF1 2
Piqued 1
RG 1
Jeremy 0

SofaF1 Championship

Mr C 80
Nick 79
Igor 79
Aitch 71
Bearded Stew 64
Alex 63
PatW 63
Christine 61
Rod 60
GrifF1 54
Lou 53
Pete 45
Sean 44
Fourstar 43
Jackie 42
Takuya 33
RG 32
Piqued 23
Jeremy 16

Get ready for Brazil…in just a few hours!

So it’s all hotting up now! Will Mr C maintain his lead at the top or is this the weekend he’ll be toppled?

What do we want?

I… don’t… know…

Oh no I do remember. We want to know the pole sitter and the top eight finishers in the race. And we want all that before Qualifying starts (remember Qualifying is at a different time tomorrow in the UK!)

As our championship is closer than the actual championship I thought it might be worth us remembering the one crucial potentially deciding factor from right at the beginning of the season.

Here at SofaF1 we not only ask you to predict each race but we also asked you to predict the whole championship. Yes… Yes we did. And the cut off was before we were even particularly sure that Brawn would be racing let alone a potentially championship winning team.

The idea was to ask people to predict the driver with the most poles, the top eight of the championship and who would be the maiden winner in the season. Nobody actually went for Webber which shows you how much we knew.

You can read what you all predicted here: http://www.sofaf1.com/2009/03/sofaf1-pole-poll-2009-championship.html

We will need to decide probably before the next race what happens if there is a tie in the number of poles. Currently Jenson has the most poles with 4, but Lewis and Vettel are on 3 so it could easily be a tie at the top.

But I have worked out what points we would get (you get double points for everything with the championship predictions and that’s been taken into account here):

And that leaves the standings at:

Good news for Igor and Rod! Bad news for Mr C. But it could all change… All we need is Nico Rosberg to win a race (4 points for about half the people), Lewis to get most poles (4 points for about half the people), and goodness knows what a change to the order might do.

I thought it best to remind everyone now rather than after the result is decided.

And mainly so we can look back to our wise old selves at the beginning of the season and prove that nobody, but nobody, expected *this* season. And anyone who tells you otherwise is probably lying!

It is a bit weird seeing the likes of Hamilton and Alonso on the podium, where you would expect them to be of course being among the best F1 drivers, but knowing that they have nothing to do with the championship this year which is busy being fought down in 4th , 5th and 6th.

A great spectacle this Singapore race, amazing to watch even if the racing today hasn’t been the closest. There was some drama with cars and cars, cars and walls, cars and hosepipes, brakes and mirrors, but Hamilton held on from pole to take a convincing win. Button holds onto vital ground, Vettel making a tiny gain, still in the game but unlikely to overhaul the Brawns now. Webber definitely out of the championship picture. Disappointment for Rosberg and Williams, athough they didn’t seem to be expecting much Rosberg looked on for a great podium finish. Glock did pretty well though to drag that Toyota up to the podium, haven’t seen too much of him for a while.

Anyway what sort of state is the sofa in now?

Round 14

Nick 10
Mr C 9
GrifF1 9
Christine 8
Alex 8
Igor 8
PatW 7
Lou 4
Piqued 2
RG 2
Jackie 2
Takuya 2
Aitch 2
Sean 2
Startledbunny 2
Fourstar 1
Jeremy 1
Rod 1
Bearded Stew 1
Pete 0

Championship

Mr C 78
Nick 76
Igor 76
Aitch 64
Alex 60
Christine 57
Bearded Stew 56
Rod 55
PatW 55
GrifF1 52
Lou 50
Sean 41
Fourstar 40
Jackie 40
Pete 39
RG 31
Takuya 29
Piqued 22
Jeremy 16