Small Field Offers Big Opportunities

The sight of F1 cars tearing loudly around a track on a Sunday afternoon can deliver a heart-pumping thrill. However, it can be a strange sport for bettors, because watching those cars drive round and round leaves you in a test of endurance of your own. You have to wait a long time to see if your prediction is right. It is also a sport where, even though things can change in a split second with a crash or a pit-stop delay, generally, there are not many factors that change the actual order of the drivers in a race.

Sometimes even if you have backed the strongest car in the race, they can get held up behind a slower leader. But that just highlights a good point about how to bet Formula 1 intelligently because it is a strong reminder that there are no certainties in sports betting. So the best you can do is knuckle down, bury yourself in reading stats and form, the things which will be a good indicator of probable results.

Race Winner Markets

F1 always has a few very elite driver/car combinations in a given season that are likely to win races. That is the thing about F1 is that even though you have a host of cars lining up on the grid at the start of a race, it is but a handful which are actually likely to win it. The teams with the more money have better equipment and better chances of winning. It is not a level playing field.

So really the field in an F1 race is pretty small in trying to pick out a winner. Across the course of a season, it would be highly unlikely to see more than five different drivers win at least one race. That leads to a natural question. Is there actual value in the F1 winner market for individual races? Well, despite all of that, yes there is.

In the 2017 F1 season exactly five different drivers shared the twenty-race wins. Between them, just three drivers combined to win seventeen of the twenty races. It is a sport which offers a lot of consistency for punters, which is a great thing. This also makes is a very simple point about how to bet Formula 1 intelligently.

It is not a sport where you really have to get all that creative about a bet. It’s not a sport where you are going to concern yourself greatly with underdog victories. Most of the time even the favorite for an F1 race will be better than even money to win outright and if you go back to the thought that only a handful of the drivers in the field are likely to actually win (barring anomalies like crashes) then it’s not bad value at all.

Pole/Win Double

If you wait to see who is on pole position in a race, you will have an even better indicator. Again you will see a handful of the same names each season being the ones who take the front spot on the grid of races. So the pole position market is generally not quite as meaty in terms of value as the race outright. However, you can optimise your Formula 1 strategy by taking a look at the double of a Pole/Race Winner bet.

In the 2017 season of F1, eleven of the twenty races were won by the driver who started in pole position. So with that in mind, that’s around a 50% chance for some much better value (the risk obviously rises) than just backing the outright winner in one or the other market.

So there are trends which you can dig out in order to Bet Formula 1 Intelligently but reading those trends is a must. As with any form of betting in any sport, the real stress is on reading form and statistics to try and bolster your chances of making the right call.

Conditions

Certain tracks offer far less overtaking opportunities than at others. The Monaco Grand Prix, which is generally just a procession from start to finish, jumps to the fore of your mind in thinking about a track where overtaking happens rarely. This is where the driver in pole position will really have a huge advantage. Bahrain is the polar opposite of Monaco with big overtaking opportunities and pole position perhaps become less important in that type of race. That leads us on to something else.

We do want to touch on some of the key variables in the sport of F1. You will find drivers who have a certain penchant for certain tracks. This is because conditions and style just suit their natural drive and you will see occurrences of drivers being a bigger threat at certain tracks.

In situations like this where you just can’t see any other outcome than a certain driving winning the race, popular options in F1 betting can be found in the Podium finish market. In races like this, an option would be to back one of the other strong contenders in the race to land in the top three. Why? Because it offers a little bit of extra-place value as it doesn’t matter where they come in the top three, just as long as they do.

So track conditions and the type of track are key components when looking ahead to make strategic options on Formula 1. Even though at the end of the day the outright markets in F1 are not actually all that varied when it comes to picking a winner, it is still more of a skill involved than just picking blindly. You need to look at those stats, the particulars of a given race, as well as form. Those are the things which can come together to paint the full picture of how to Bet Formula 1 Intelligently.