How to read the DFS board
What the DraftKings F1 Showdown board shows, what every column means, how DraftKings scores a race, and why the pole-sitter has the lowest floor on the board.
What the board is
The DFS board is our projection for one DraftKings F1 Showdown slate. Showdown is the only format DraftKings runs for Formula 1: one race, one lineup, six slots.
- A $50,000 salary cap for the whole lineup.
- One captain. The captain scores 1.5× his points and costs 1.5× his salary.
- Four regular driver slots.
- One constructor — a team, scored off both of its cars.
- You cannot take both drivers of a team and that team's constructor in the same lineup.
- Lineups lock at the start of the race. Nothing can be changed after that.
The starting grid is only known after Saturday qualifying, and half of DraftKings scoring depends on it. So there are two boards for every race.
- Provisional
- Built before qualifying. Pace comes from our race projection; our qualifying projection stands in for the grid.
- Final
- Built after qualifying. The real grid replaces the stand-in, and every column that depends on the grid is rebuilt on it.
The columns
Every column on the board, left to right.
- SAL
- The driver's DraftKings salary in a regular driver slot.
- CPT
- The captain salary. It is 1.5× the regular salary.
- PROJ
- Projected DraftKings points: the median of 100,000 simulated races. The bar behind the number runs from the floor — the 10th percentile of those races — to the ceiling, the 90th.
- VAL
- Projected points per $1,000 of salary.
- FIN
- Projected finishing position — the median across the simulated races.
- BT%
- The share of simulated races in which the driver finishes ahead of his teammate. Beating your teammate is worth +5 DraftKings points.
- PROJ OWN
- Projected ownership: the share of lineups in the main DraftKings tournament that hold this driver in a regular slot.
- CPT OWN
- The same share, for the captain slot.
- LEV
- Leverage: the driver's projected ceiling relative to his projected ownership. It is positive when the ceiling is high for how few lineups hold him.
How DraftKings scores an F1 race
A driver's score is his finishing position plus five things that happen during the race.
- Places
- +1 for every place gained against the starting grid, and −1 for every place lost. There is no cap and no bracket.
- Fastest lap
- +3 for the fastest lap of the race.
- Laps led
- +0.25 for every lap led.
- Beat teammate
- +5 for finishing ahead of your teammate.
- Classified
- +1 for being classified — completing at least 90% of the race distance.
A constructor scores its two drivers' finishing points, laps led and fastest lap added together, plus three bonuses that need both cars: +2 when both are classified, +5 when both finish in the top 10, and +3 when both finish on the podium. Constructors get no place-differential points, and the beat-teammate bonus does not apply to them.
Why does the pole-sitter have the lowest floor on the board?
The floor is the 10th percentile of the simulated races — the outcome a driver beats 9 times out of 10. A front-runner with a 13% chance of retiring has a retirement sitting inside that bottom 10%, so his floor is his retirement.
A retirement from the front of the grid scores around −10 to −20 DraftKings points. The same retirement from the back of the grid scores about −4, because there were only a few places left to lose. These are real DraftKings results.
The lesson: a front-runner's downside is larger than a cheap car's, not smaller. That is exactly why the captain choice carries so much of a lineup's variance — the captain multiplies the negative score by 1.5 as well. What that trade looks like from the other side is in the captain slot.
Ownership and leverage
Projected ownership is the share of lineups in the main DraftKings tournament that hold a driver. The board splits it in two: a regular slot (PROJ OWN) and the captain slot (CPT OWN).
Ownership matters in a tournament because a tournament pays the top finishers, not everyone who scores well. If the most-owned driver wins, most lineups gain the same points and the field ties. If a driver almost nobody holds wins, the lineups holding him jump the whole field.
Leverage is a driver's projected ceiling relative to his projected ownership. It is positive when the ceiling is high for how few lineups hold him.
Contest types and prize pools
Formula 1 is a small DraftKings market: roughly $110K–$180K in total prizes per race, spread across about 85–95 contests.
- Flagship
- A $20 tournament of 1,750–4,400 entries. The prize pool runs $30K–$75K and first place pays $10K–$20K.
- Big field
- Cheap tournaments from $0.25 to $4, with 700–7,000 entries.
- High roller
- A handful of tiny contests at $1,500–$10,600 to enter, with 3–5 players in them.
- Single entry
- Single-entry and 3-max contests, with small prize pools.
Ownership behaves almost identically across the big-field tournaments, so one ownership projection reads for all of them. Single-entry contests are the exception: they concentrate more heavily on the obvious captain.