Open Wheelers the app started life as a text thread. A group of friends with a love of Formula 1 just wanted a fun alternative to complex fantasy games with drafted teams, waivers, etc. So we played a manual game within a text thread, a gentleman's agreement to get your picks in before the lights go out, and yours truly would manually tally results after each race, post the updated standings, and we'd argue about who was actually winning. It worked well enough for years. And it was completely holding the game back.
The thing about a manual game is that your pick categories are limited to whatever a human scorekeeper (me!) can reasonably verify after a race. Podium finish? Easy, check the top 3. DNF? Straightforward enough, the list of retirements is right there. Fastest lap? Easyish, one name, but F1 stopped publishing it clearly when they stopped awarding points to drivers in 2025, so it required a search each week.
So that's what we were using: Podium, Fastest Lap, DNF. Three categories, three picks. Simple, fun, and perfectly adequate for a casual league among friends run out of a text thread. You may not think of the Messages app as a game engine, but it actually kinda worked.
But "adequate" and "kinda" are dangerous words for someone who obsesses over game design.
The problem with Fastest Lap
Turns out the mediocrity of our system had everything to do with the picks and points, and how they were born out of what was doable for a guy manually managing the stats. Take Fastest Lap, which sounds like an exciting stat. In practice, it's one of the least interesting picks you can make, and here's why: in today's F1, the fastest lap is all too often just an index of the top cars in the race. It was actually a bit more interesting in the first years of our game when F1 actually gave out a point for Fastest Lap - then you'd sometimes see a driver deep in the pack pit late for fresh soft tires to try and snag a point. When F1 did away with that rule in 2025, Fastest Lap became a strategic afterthought, not a battle.
More importantly, it basically became a proxy pick for the Podium, a pick we already had. So we wanted something that rewarded paying attention to the actual racing. Something with real variance from week to week, where deep knowledge of the grid actually mattered. And maybe even something that could reward a bit of grit for that driver who battles throughout the race with hard driving even if it doesn't necessarily net them podium glory. Think Lewis Hamilton struggling at Ferrari but in some races rage-passing half the field from a poor qualifying start.
Enter the Overtaker
The stat we really wanted was most positions gained: the driver who climbs the most spots from their starting position to their finishing position. In F1, this is sometimes called the "overtaker" award. It rewards the most dynamic racing of the afternoon: the recovery drives, the strategic masterstrokes, the scrappy midfield battles that don't make the broadcast highlights but absolutely define the race.
It's Fernando Alonso starting P17 after a qualifying penalty and slicing through to P7. Or a midfield driver nailing an alternate strategy to jump six cars on the undercut. Or someone surviving a chaotic wet start to gain a dozen spots while half the grid spins off. Yes, probably Max. You get the idea. These are the moments that make F1 worth watching, and the Overtaker pick puts a fantasy stake directly in them.
The problem? Try scoring that manually from a group chat.
To calculate positions gained, you need each driver's starting grid position and their finishing position, then compute the delta for every classified finisher, then rank them. That's 20 drivers, two data points each, every race. It's not rocket science, but it's exactly the kind of tedious bookkeeping that kills a casual game. No one's going to maintain a spreadsheet for a fun side competition with friends. And if the scorekeeper gets it wrong, which I will, because grid penalties and post-race time penalties shift the numbers, the arguments start.
The app does the boring parts
This is the quiet superpower of moving a game from text to software. The app doesn't just automate scoring, it unlocks categories that were impractical before. When results flow in digitally, computing positions-gained is trivial. Grid position minus finish position, sort descending, done. The app handles ties, accounts for DNS and DNF edge cases, and posts the answer the moment results are confirmed.
What took a motivated scorekeeper (me!) 15 minutes of cross-referencing now takes zero effort. And the pick itself, who's going to gain the most positions, is infinitely more interesting than Fastest Lap. It asks you to think about:
- Qualifying mismatches: Which fast cars are starting out of position due to grid penalties?
- Race pace vs. one-lap speed: Who has a car that's better in race trim than qualifying trim?
- Strategy variance: Which teams might roll the dice on an alternate strategy that could leap them up the order?
- Track characteristics: Is this a track where overtaking is physically possible, or will grid position mostly hold?
Every one of those questions requires genuine knowledge of the sport. That's a pick category with depth.
The design principle
The lesson here isn't specific to F1 or fantasy sports. It's a broader game design idea: the best mechanics are often the ones that were too complicated to run by hand. When you move a game to software, don't just digitize the existing rules. Ask what was impossible before and whether it's interesting now.
For Open Wheelers, Fastest Lap was a concession to manual scoring. Overtaker is the pick we always wanted but couldn't practically support. The app didn't just make the game easier to play, it made it a better game.
And if you think that's an incremental difference, try picking the Overtaker for a rainy Interlagos. That's not a checkbox. That's a decision.
Open Wheelers is a casual F1 fantasy game for friends, built by Stalefish Labs.
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