Yes it may be a little early to start a game for next season but I just thought I'd get the ball rolling now before I forget or something.

The general idea of this game is before the start of each Grand Prix, you will predict the time for the winner to complete the Grand Prix to the nearest millisecond. Then when after the race when we know the real winning time, I will work out the difference between your predicted winning time and the actual winning time. Over the season the person who gets the lowest overall difference between their prediction and the real time will be the winner.

If anybody would be interested in taking part please comment, or if you think it's a daft idea and shouldn't bother, then also comment

HOW IT WILL WORK

1. The deadline for all the predictions is 1 hour before the start of the Grand Prix, I'll post the time in the appropriate thread of the deadline and I'll also post when the deadline has past. Any predictions made after the deadline will not be counted and 5 will apply below.
2. Predictions should be posted into the appropriate thread except for the last round where predictions can be sent via PM.
3. All times should be posted in the form h:mm:ss.000 just to make things easy when reading the times.
4. Once the race has finished and I have the winning time from the Grand Prix, I will post the results from the Grand Prix showing who got the closest results, and then the overall championship.
5. If you miss a deadline, I will take the time predicted by another player which created the greatest difference from the actual racing time, and then increase the difference by 30 seconds and make that your time for that Grand Prix.

For example
If there were four taking part and one missed the deadline
After the Grand Prix, the winning time was 1:36:23.764.
The following times were predicted:

1:34:23.955
1:37:28.322
1:30:23.623

The time 1:30:23.623 creates the biggest difference out of the other 3 with a difference of 6:00.141. The player who missed the deadline would be given a time of 1:29:53.623, a 30 second increase in difference to 6:30.141.

6. If a race doesn't go the full distance (ie all the laps aren't completed and the race doesn't go over the 2 hour mark) I will discard the results.

Pretty interesting, I think. I might be in for this one, will really try to test my prediction skills next year here.

Interestingly last year I thought about organizing this game for 2009 season. I would name it "Guess The Time." But there had been another competition called GtTimes before and I also thought it would be boring and no one would really care (no offense!).

So anyway, I'll guess if you host it.

None taken

What was the GtTimes competition, how similar is it to guessing the winning time?

I'd be quite interested

Well I didn't join it at the time. you may consult to Makarias for more info. Or look here for 2003 results:
http://forums.autosport.com/index.php?showtopic=62865

Bet you can't have as up and down a season as I managed in the F1 Pools this year.

It was a competition about guessing both the best Q times as well as the fastest race lap, see e.g. http://forums.autosport.com/index.php?showtopic=70016

Ah right, thanks for the links

Posted some rules, they may change but might as well get some things down.

Looks interesting. I might have a go at this. Although I am not to keen on the PM thing I guess it is your comp so you can make whatever rules you like.

Quite like the missed guess rule. It at least means you get an automatic entry so you do not get as penalised as no entry at all, ie a guess of zero means you would score upto 2+ hours.

Sounds good, except I would only do the PM thing for the last round. It works Ok as a thread for all the other comps.

Cheers

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll change the rules now

Sounds like a fun game, I'll definitely be predicting!

There will probably be quite a big benefit to predicting on the day of the race (especially if there are any question marks over the weather), so will it be all right to put in a banker guess early in the week in case we know we might not be near the computer on Sunday, and then change the guess on race day?

Yeah, I will allow you to make early guesses and then amend them before the deadline.