Formula 1 betting has come a long way since the turn of the century. It used to be a little-known market with hardly any interest attached to it. People preferred traditional horse racing, but an influx of new fans and heightened global sporting appeal has thrust F1 betting right into the limelight.
Fans can find Formula 1 betting options all over the place these days, even some of the best betting sites outside the UK cater to this market. It’s more widespread than ever before though we have one tiny complaint: there needs to be more F1 betting markets!
What do we mean by this? A “betting market” refers to different things you can bet on within a sport. Currently, most F1 bookmakers will provide the following:
- Race Winner
- Fastest Qualifier
- Fastest Lap
- Podium Finish
- Driver’s Championship Winner
- Driver Matchups
- Constructor’s Championship Winner
That looks like a lot of options – but we think they could do a lot better. Here are some of the F1 betting markets we’re eager to see as the sports continue to dominate the global sporting spotlight:
Over/Under Points
You can bet on whether a driver will finish in the points – and if a constructor will get double points – but you can’t bet on over/under points. We think this would be an exciting market to consider as it means you can predict where someone will finish without being entirely accurate.
For example, betting on over/under 10.5 points for George Russell in a race means you effectively think he’ll finish 5th or higher. This is an awesome bet for cars in those points positions beyond the podium. You typically get a little cluster of teams finishing in different places every race, so an over/under rewards you for predicting which driver will perform well without needing to get their position spot on.
You won’t get amazing odds for this, but it’s a great idea to create more predictable F1 bets with smaller wins. As we write this, we realise that’s probably why bookies aren’t using this market. They likely fear it’s too easy to predict and they’ll lose too much money!
Driver Market Bets
F1 fans will be well versed in what they refer to as “Silly Season”. This is when drivers and teams start communicating about new contracts. Some teams sever ties with current drivers while others look to extend contracts. When one driver gets dropped or moves to another team, it usually starts a titanic shuffle with more movements following.
As a result, it creates the perfect betting market! We should be able to bet on where certain drivers will end up next season. Is Carlos Sainz going to Williams – or will Alpine come in and steal him? What of Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas – at least one of them has to leave, or will they both go? There’s so much speculation and this happens every single year.
Even in years where driver contracts look set in stone, you should still be able to bet on the driver’s movements in case things change. Look at Sergio Perez as the prime example. A few weeks ago it was revealed he signed a new contract at Red Bull. Now, this is completely up in the air as people wonder if performance clauses mean he’ll be kicked out by the end of the season.
Other sports let you bet on transfers, so why can’t you do the same in F1?!
Safety Car Markets
Technically, you can bet on whether there’ll be a safety car in a race. It’s a simple Yes/No bet with odds representative of different factors, like:
- The weather conditions
- Past races
- Which drivers start close to one another
The first two are likely to be the biggest factors in setting safety car deployment odds as wet races generally lead to an increased risk of crashes. Moreover, certain tracks always seem to throw up a safety car – for instance, Suzuka in Japan has a 67% safety car probability across all of its previous races.
This bet is fine, but we’d love to see other safety car markets. Plus, hardly any bookmakers offer it so you have to go digging around for this specific market! We want it to be more prevalent across all bookies – as well as introducing these markets:
- More than one safety car – Another Yes/No bet. Simply put, you bet on whether there’ll be more than one safety car in the race. Alternatively, you could make this an over/under bet to predict if there’ll be more or less than 2, 3 or 4 safety cars over a weekend.
- Number of laps behind the safety car – This is our favourite of the two options. It can be an over/under wager again where the bookmaker sets laps and you guess how long the safety car will be out for. We see it as a fun little mini-game to think about during races where there’s not a lot of action and a safety car slows things down.
Handicap Points
Bets can be placed on who will finish in the points, which team will get the most points and so on. We’ve already brought up the idea of over/under points markets, but what about handicap points betting?
If you’re not privy to betting terms, a “handicap” is when an event is given a made-up disadvantage (or sometimes an advantage) before it happens. In football, you often get something like a -2 handicap on a team to win a match. This means they start the game 2-0 down and your bet only wins if they win the match by 3 or more goals.
It’s fairly simple to understand – but what would this look like in Formula 1? You could have markets where you pick a driver and bet on them to score points with a handicap. For instance, instead of betting on Verstappen to win a race, you bet on him to score points with a handicap of -17. It would effectively mean you win the bet if he finishes second or first. The same can be done for teams as well.
First Car To Pit
We find it interesting how you can bet on the first car to retire from a race, but not the first one to pit! This seems like a very easy betting market to introduce – it’s normally fairly obvious which teams will pit first. Those in the midfield end up going before the frontrunners as it’s harder to manage tyres when you’re following loads of cars.
However, we’ve also seen countless instances when a car has to pit on lap 1 due to damage. Or, maybe changeable weather conditions force teams to gamble. It feels like a very cool market to throw in, providing you with more diversity.
Which F1 betting markets do you like the sound of the most and are there any you can think of that haven’t been mentioned here? We love the sport and think it’s growing into one of the biggest in the world, so it deserves as many betting markets as other big sports!
