F1P6 started in the Usenet newsgroup rec.autos.sport sometime during the '80s. Dan Jones ran the competition for several years. Unfortunately, I have no records of these years.
For the 1992 season, the competition was run jointly by John Francis, Spyros Potamianos, and Paul Winalski. This season saw the introduction of the Popularity Poll.
Players scored 2 points for correctly predicting a driver who finished in the top 6. If they also got that driver in the correct position, they scored as a bonus the F1 points for that position plus an additional 2 points. Correctly predicting the winner was thus worth 14 points (2+10+2), while correctly predicting 6th place was worth 5 points (2+1+2).
Jonathan Swaby and Frans Oort were co-champions. Naren Chauhan finished third, 2 points behind. 225 players participated.
Spyros and John both lost Internet access, so Paul Winalski ran the competition solo from then on. Scoring was as in 1993. For this season, the concept of "carry-over" picks was introduced as a partial remedy for the unreliability of e-mail.
Paul O'Donnell won the championship. Ari Vienola was second, two points back, and Antonio Jorge Marques came in third, three points back from Paul. 412 players participated.
This was the first year of the current scoring system, where players score points on a sliding 10-6-4-3-2-1 scale for drivers finishing in the top 6 based on how far off their prediction was from the actual result.
Thierry Vallee also set up a page for F1P6 in France on a brand new Internet service known as the World-Wide Web, including an automated form for submitting picks. This introduced F1P6 to a whole new audience of players.
Ryan T. Wood won the championship. S. N. Gouldsworthy finished second, 4 points back. Ken Chung came in third, 12 points behind Ryan. 925 players participated.
Thierry was away from the Internet for the first part of the season, so a new WWW home page was set up at Tom Haapanen's Motorsport News International service, although the Pick6 page in France continued to be in service. Jay Carina set up another F1P6 submission form on his Racer Archive site. The explosive growth in the World-Wide Web was reflected in an equally explosive growth in F1P6 participation.
1995 was also the first year in recent Pick6 history where there was a perfect score. 14 players correctly predicted the six points-paying positions for the Pacific GP, for a perfect 60 point score: Aaron Hecker, George Kravitz, Mark A Kyprianou, Deon Meyer, Juergen Peham, Duncan Thompson, Roger Virgo, Steve Walton, Paul Webb, Craig A Wood, Andre Hinkenjann, Mika Lilius, Bill Wade, and Volker Wiehle.
Paul Smyth won the championship, with Craig A Wood second (one point back) and Kevin Kealy third (another two points back). 3507 players participated.
[Last updated 4 February 1996]