History is (usually) a poor predictor of the future
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Our last blog post announced a tool for calculating the best F1 fantasy team to have held for a adjustable window of 2024 races.
With a tool like that in hand, it naturally follows to ask - should I use the output of that tool to pick my team? And so in this post we dig into the numbers - what would have happened if you had used the output of that tool in order to pick your team?
To explore this, we wrote a simple script that goes through all window sizes (of 1, 2, ..., up to 22,.since we're through 23 races in the 2024 season), and considers how the (optimal) team as calculated by our evaluator would've scored the next week. The results are plotted in the heat map below. The brighter the green, the better the score relative to optimal.
Pretty interesting plot! And just to be super clear about what we're looking at - the box in the upper left is the performance in race 2, if you chose the optimal team from race 1, whereas the next box to the right is the performance in race 3, if you chose the optimal team from race 2 (i.e. a window size of 1), whereas the next row considers window size 2 (and starts with race 3). This continues all the way to race 23, which only has a single box, because there is only one 22-race window to consider. Hopefully that makes sense.
So what are some of the takeaways here. One takeaway - race 21 (Sao Paulo Grand Prix) was clearly a weird outcome. Whether you considered a 1 race window, or a 20 race window, a prediction using this strategy was quite bad.
Another, albeit hand wavy takeaway - is that in the interval race 10 thru race 17, you would've done really well by taking that particular interval into consideration, but nothing shorter. To me this says that even with race to race volatility, there was tremendous underlying consistency (likely by McLaren and Ferrari).
And then, captain obvious here, and again anecdotally, using a window size of 3 or less would've been a poor strategy this year, no matter which race you're considering.
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Disclaimer: we have no affiliation to Formula One (or any of their companies or brands). The author of this capability is simply a fan who enjoys playing the fantasy game. This information is provided with no guarantees as to its' accuracy, use at your own risk.'
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