F1 DFS: How Does DFS Scoring Work

It’s always fun to have a new DFS sport to play. This time it’s F1 as the rise of F1 continues to manifest in the US. If you’ve become a fan of F1 through the Netflix series “Drive To Survive”, welcome! If you’ve liked the sport for a while then adding DFS to your fandom will be fun.

Just like with every DFDS sport, there is a scoring system in place that it’s important to learn. Knowing the scoring system, just like in fantasy sports, is important to finding your way to the money. Just because we’ve gotten familiar with the NASCAR scoring systems, doesn’t mean we can carry that strategy over to F1 directly. It’s not quite that simple, even though both are racing. In this piece, we’ll cover the scoring categories on DraftKings and how exactly they work. Then we’ll go into how to capitalize on those categories when building lineups for each race. For each of these categories, we’ll talk about some of the niche or unassuming strategies.

Roster Construction

It’s become common to see DraftKings give us $50,000 salary caps for the DFS sports they offer. That’s the same with F1. However, how we build the rosters is different than NASCAR or other sports.

Instead of needing six drivers for the rosters, we need five total drivers and a constructor. One of those drivers is a captain. If some of this is different or confusing for you, it’ll all make sense in a minute. Picking drivers is the part that we’re used to from NASCAR, though the scoring is different — we’ll break that down in the next section. If the term “Constructor” is new to you, it basically means team in F1. There are 10 total teams with two cars each for a field of 20 drivers for each race — barring injury or ailment, the drivers are the same for each race. Just like in NASCAR, there are top-tier teams and lower-level teams and the pricing reflects that. Some of the top-tier teams you probably have heard of are Mercedes, Red Bull, McLaren, and Ferrari. Teams like Alpha Tauri, Alpine, Haas, and Williams are lower tier with the others falling somewhere in between.

In order to build a lineup, we need to pick one of those teams, four regular-priced drivers, and a captain, who is marked up 1.5x. All of that for less than $50,000. Just like in NASCAR, we won’t be able to get all of the top drivers so we’ll need to use strategy to sort out who to play. The other thing to be careful of when building lineups is, we can’t stack two drivers and that constructor together in a lineup. For example, if we wanted to play Ferrari in the lineup, we’d have to play either Charles Leclerc or Carlos Sainz in our builds, but not both. However, you could play both Leclerc and Sainz, so long as you don’t play Ferrari as the Constructor.

Scoring Categories

So we’ve covered the basics of building rosters, but what are we building rosters to do? Score points. So how do the drivers and teams score points in F1 DFS? Let’s talk about it since it’s a bit different than what we may be used to for NASCAR.

Here are the Driver points categories:

• Finish Position
• Laps Led
• Defeated Teammate
• Fastest Lap
• Driver Qualified at Finish
• Spots vs Grid Position

Here are the Constructor points categories:

• Constructor Finishing Position
• Constructor Laps Led
• Constructor Classified Finish
• Constructor Top-10s
• Constructor Podium

Let’s start with the Driver Scoring categories and break those down one-by-one with what they mean for fantasy points and why they’re important.

Finish Position

This is perhaps the simplest one to understand as it’s just based on where a driver finishes in the grid. The scoring matches F1 World Championship points as well, which makes it a fun tie in.

A driver won’t receive any finish position points for finishing 11th-20th in the race, however that doesn’t mean they won’t score points. Other categories still give them that shot. While this a good way to score driver points, it’s not perhaps the most important way of scoring, especially for cheaper drivers.

Laps Led

If a driver leads a lap, they get .1 pts for it. It’s not a lot to be sure, but F1 drivers can rack up laps led if they’re starting up front, much like a NASCAR driver at a short track. The thing to keep in mind here is that F1 races are relatively short in terms of laps with most races being between 50-70 laps. One each is above and below that range. The most points we’ll see in this category is 7.8, at Monaco. Not a major source of points.

Defeated Teammate

This folks, is where all the drama we see in Drive To Survive come to fruition for DFS. Simply put, if your driver finishes ahead of their teammate, regardless of finish position, you get five points. Whether your Lewis Hamilton beating Valtteri Bottas (last year) between first and second or your Mick Schumacher beating Nikita Mazepin (last year) between 19th and 20th, it’s still five points. These five points are the reason to play cheap drivers who may not finish in the top-10 but will beat their teammates. For example, the Haas drivers have typically been very cheap since they’ve not done well the last few seasons. However, the defeated teammate bonus and classified at the finish bonus point means that even if they finish 19th but ahead of their teammate they still get six points. If we were to play a mid-tier driver like Sergio Perez of Red Bull who averaged a seventh-place finish last year, he gets six points for the finish and one for being classified at the finish but if he finishes behind Max Verstappen, his seven points cost you $8,800 versus Kevin Magnussen’s six points for $3,800.

Fastest Lap

In F1, a driver gets a point toward their World Championship standing if they run the fastest lap of a race. DraftKings gives us three points for that feat. It’s only one lap that gets credit, not the fastest driver each lap of the race. This is a nice boost but it’s a bit fluky to try and predict as it generally depends if a driver is having a worse day finish-wise than they wanted and so they go for a fast lap late in the race to salvage a point in the standings.

Driver Qualified At Finish

This is basically a fancy way of saying that a driver was running at the finish of the race and completed 90-percent or more of the scheduled laps. We get one point for this on DraftKings. As long as a driver or team doesn’t retire the car mid race or they don’t wreck out, you get the point.

Spots Vs. Grid Position

This is the F1 equivalent of Position Differential in NASCAR, though it’s tallied differentially. We’re not getting a point per spot gained or lost. Instead, we’re getting points based on the following breakdown:

The differential may not only come from where they qualify but also if they get a grid penalty for something they’ve done in practice, qualifying, or if something is wrong with the car. These are all things to pay attention to as they will provide value for drivers in certain races they may not otherwise have. A cheap way to get these points is also having drivers retire from the race who were starting in front of the driver you played. As you can see, there can be negative points as well, which clearly isn’t ideal for DFS.

Captain Spot

Much like showdown slates on DraftKings, we have a captain slot in F1. The scoring categories for the captain spot are the same as the ones for the regular driver spot, however, captains earn 1.5 times the points. That also comes with a price increase of 1.5x. So if Max Verstappen is $12,000 for a regular spot, he’d be $18,000 for the captain spot and if he gets you 28 points on average in the regular spot, that’s 42 on average in the captain spot.

Now that we have a handle on the driver scoring, let’s take a look at Constructor’s Scoring and how can build points from playing strategy.

Constructor Finishing Position

Just like with the drivers scoring, we get points from where they finish the race. The difference here is that both drivers for a team are added together for the Constructor scoring. So if both drivers finish in the top-10, we get the points for both of them, if only one does, it’s just the points for the one. For example, let’s say that we’ve played Ferrari and Charles Leclerc finishes fourth and Carlos Sainz finishes sixth, that’s 18 points just for finishing position.

Constructor Laps Led

This is the same scoring, .1 points per lap led, as the driver scoring with a slight difference. For the Constructor, we get points for both drivers on the team leading laps, regardless if we played them or not. So sticking with Ferrari, if Leclerc leads 40 laps and Sainz leads 10, we get five points for Constructor, even if we didn’t play one of or either of the drivers.

Constructor Classified at Finish

While it’s the same category as the driver scoring has, there’s a wrinkle in this to get the two points. Both drivers have to be classified, aka complete at least 90-percent of the laps, in order to get the points. That means if a driver wrecks out or retires early, we don’t get the points from this Constructor category. Taking backmarker teams can be dicey for these points, but then again it’s also dicey to get top-10 finish points as well from them most races.

Constructor Top-10s and Podiums

These are bonus points that the Constructors can get by having good to great finishes from their drivers. In the example above where Ferrari had both Leclerc and Sainz finish fourth and sixth respectively, they’d have gotten five bonus points for having both drivers in the top-10. That would give them 23 points from finish positions and bonuses. If Leclerc and Sainz managed to both finish in the top-3, Ferrari would get an extra three-point bonus, on top of the five points. So if Leclerc and Sainz finished 2-3 they’d get 33 points for finish position, five for the top-10 bonus, and three for podium bonus giving Ferrari 41 points, not including the laps led or fast lap points.

It’s important to note that only one team a race can possibly get the Podium bonus and a max of five teams a race can get the Top-10 bonus. These can be big differentiators if played right.

In general, Constructors can be where a ton of points are scored for your roster, especially if they have a great day and dominate the race. The trick with the constructors is that the top teams are priced up which means that picking the right constructor to be able to grab drivers who will score well is vital.

Each track in F1 has its own character and strategy to it based on how hard it is to pass, how many laps there are, and how each circuit fits certain teams’ setups better or worse. I’ll make mention of that in each write-up for each Grand Prix as well. There are some very interesting ways to use the scoring to build lineups. It’s not always about trying to get as many top-tier drivers in the lineups as possible but instead using bonuses to differentiate your builds from others.

You can always reach out on Twitter @theselzman to get any questions answered or in the Discord channel as well.

Related Links

2022 F1 Betting Preview

NASCAR DFS Coverage