Okay, so I got curious about how they calculate the odds for the Formula 1 championship. You know, who’s favored to win, who’s the underdog, that kind of stuff. So, I did some digging and experimenting.
First, I gathered a bunch of data. I looked at past race results, current season standings, even things like team performance and driver history. I figured all of this plays into who’s likely to win.
Experiment Steps
- Scraped Some Data. You can always find data from website for F1.
- Clean up all the data.
- Built a simple spreadsheet.
- Add columns like race wins, points, and some made-up “performance scores” based on how consistent each driver had been.
Then, I tried to put it all together into a, well, a formula. I’m no math whiz, so it was pretty basic. I basically weighted different factors. For example, I gave more weight to recent race wins than to wins from, like, two seasons ago.
My “formula” looked something like this (it’s super simplified, mind you):
(Recent Race Wins 3) + (Current Season Points 2) + (Past Championship Wins 1) + (My Made-Up Performance Score 1)
I plugged in the numbers for each driver and, bam, I had a rough “score.” The higher the score, the more likely (in my super amateur calculation) that driver was to win the championship.
It was pretty fun to play around with. Obviously, it’s nowhere near as sophisticated as what the actual bookmakers use. They probably have all sorts of fancy algorithms and data I don’t even know about. But it gave me a little peek into how they might be thinking about it.
I even tweaked the weights a few times. Like, what if I made recent race wins way more important? Or what if I completely ignored past championships? It was interesting to see how the “odds” shifted based on my changes.
In the end, I realized it’s a complex beast. There are so many variables in F1, it’s impossible to capture it all in a simple formula. But hey, it was a fun experiment, and I learned a bit along the way!
