This article is all about the results so far in F1 Badger’s Fantasy Formula One game, which is free to play over on FantasyFormulaOne.com – you can still join now and be in with a chance of winning an exclusive F1 Badger trophy mug

We’re pretty much half way through the season and the championship is tightening up in Badger’s Fantasy F1 league.  With a further eight Trophy Mugs up for grabs as well as the Silverstone Experience, there’s plenty to play for.  So, if you’re top of table, you’re going to want to stay there, or if you not quite geting the points you need each race then you’re going to like to have some help, or at least some reasoning to come up with some tactical changes.  Fear not, Badger’s on hand to give you the lowdown.

First up, you’ll remember that when setting up your team at the start of the season that there’s a budget cap of £70million to avoid making it too easy to choose all the top drivers and cars.  With Brawn and Red Bull being the dominant forces in 2009, this budget cap hasn’t had much of an effect.  That said, when changing your teams and drivers you do still have to be within the budget, so to help, here’s two charts showing how good/bad value each team and driver has been so far in 2009.  Not surprisingly BrawnGP and Jenson Button stand out with their massive success, but there are some other interesting results here too.  (the larger the bar, the better the value)

Points scored so far, in total for each driver/car on the 2009 grid in Fantasy F1, their cost and how much each point has cost for them this year.  The points here do not match the race finish points because Fantasy F1’s scoring system awards points for drivers that improve during a race, i.e. if Glock starts 10th and finishes 1st, he’ll score 10pts for the win and 10 for improving 10 places.  Lewis Hamilton has been a big winner with some monumental drives in his dog of a car.

The nature of the Fantasy F1 is that you’re all playing each other in the main league, competing for the race and championship prizes.  We’re not going to reveal everyone’s driver and car line up, but so you have an idea of who’s popular at the moment, take a gander at these charts.  You could also use this to see if any of the not-so-popular drivers have scored well, or are likely too.  If you’ve got them in your team, you’ll have one over everyone else who hasn’t.

Finally, here’s where it really counts – the qualifying and race predictions.  This is where points really are gained.  If you predict the top 3 correctly in the race or for qualifying then you’re in line to score very well indeed.  If you get all of them spot on then you’ll be tough to beat.  Over the past 8 races there have been over 20,000 predicitions submitted into the Fantasy F1 game and here’s how it all pans out in a couple of handy bar charts.

Remember, you can have any driver in your prediction – they don’t have to be in your team.  You can play it safe and for example put Jenson Button down for 1st, 2nd and 3rd to hopefully guarantee yourself some points, but to win, you’ll need to be a little more daring than that.

Best of luck for Germany everyone, it’s sure to be yet another exciting race and there’s every chance that we have a new winner for the 2009 season.  What do you think is going to the podium for Germany?