Our McLaren Grand Prix League team has been spared humiliation in the British leg of the competition thanks to the good offices of Lewis Hamilton and Nick Heidfeld – something that we’d like to thank them both for.
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The BritsOnPole squad managed to gain a modestly satisfying 737 places at Silverstone, putting us 9,077th out of 19,621 players, well in range of our, er, revised season goal of finishing in the top half of the competition.
Our points tally from this race was 344, some way down from our season best of 395, scored in Canada. (You can tell we’ve bought into BMW, can’t you?) But in the upper range of what we’ve tended to score so far.
Our current points total is 2,988 for the season. If we tell you that the leading team currently has 3,674 points you will see that we’d abandoned the notion of seeing the inside of the McLaren Technology Centre by the time the teams arrived in Barcelona.
With the July transfer window just opened, it’s a good time to time to reflect on why we got ourselves in such a mess at the beginning of the season, and how we could avoid it in the future.
(Don’t forget to get along yourself and have a bit of a sort-out, should you be playing too.)
We know now that our original driver choices, comprising such sentimental money and far-fetched long shots as Adrian Sutil, Anthony Davidson and Kazuki Nakajima, were pretty stupid.
Setting up our next team we’ll be thinking along the lines we’d pursue if contemplating a small investment at the bookmaker’s.
That means looking for reliable performers offering small chunks of regular good value rather than taking a massive punt on long shots who probably won’t perform more than once, at best. So that will be our guiding principle next year.
In other news, we have finally been able to get shot of Super Aguri. (We’re still stuck with Davidson but we’ll try to deal with that in September.)
We found ourselves in a tricky situation here. Neither driver nor team score us anything at all, on account of not being in the competition any more. And if McLaren have an official way of dealing with this then we haven’t found it.
And because each was worth so little we couldn’t sell them for enough to buy into any replacements. A dilemma made worse by the fact you’re only allowed one driver swap and one team swap in any given transfer period.
We’ve got round it by a complex set of transactions that, unfortunately, meant the sacrifice of Nico Rosberg. He was scoring well for us but has had to go in favour of Rubens Barrichello, thus freeing enough money to swap the defunct Super Aguri for the infinitely more desirable Red Bull.
We realise Rubinho has almost certainly scored his season best already. But at least there’s always the possibility of him doing some business for us, set against a team that definitely couldn’t. So it was a no-brainer in the end.
So that’s where we stand at the half-way mark. And, let’s be honest, it could be worse.
Good luck if you’re playing McLaren Grand Prix league or any other form of fantasy F1 – and our recommendations are definitely for Jarno Trulli and Nick Heidfeld as nice, regular points-earners who come at a reasonable price.
If you’ve got any tips you’d like to share, leave a comment.