When fans cast their votes for Formula One’s new Driver of The Day campaign for the Australian Grand Prix, anyone with a bit of technical knowledge could view the vote counts. Although Romain Grosjean was crowned the fan favourite of the weekend, another unexpected choice topped the charts.
The Driver of The Day is a new fan engagement campaign that uses the internet to allow fans to interact with Formula One. The sport has a very negative image for not interacting with the fans and their limited existence on the World Wide Web. Formula One is aiming to change this by allowing fans to vote for the driver that they think was the best during the race.
It was discovered that when you vote for the Driver of The Day, you can use an internet browser’s web inspector feature to view the current results of the poll. Self-proclaimed “geek” and “adrenaline junky”, Tim Ceuppens, was nice enough to share the final results of the poll, via Twitter.
According to these results, Rio Haryanto, the Formula One rookie from Indonesia, received over 22 000 votes. In comparison, Romain Grosjean had earned over 13 000 votes. So why didn’t Haryanto win the title?
Although some conspiracy theorists are saying that Formula One is embarrassed to have a rookie on the lowest ranked team win, the more likely answer is bots. As noted on the official Formula One voting website, “in the interests of fairness, multiple votes identified as originating from the same source were not counted”, meaning that there were probably a number of automated bots that cast multiple votes.
Whenever there is an online vote, bots can be expected. However, FOM seems to have been able to filter out the bad results using the IP address on your computer or some other tracking method. Although it is important to remember that the validity of these leaked poll results has not been confirmed.
Regardless, congratulations to Romain Grosjean of the Haas F1 team for earning the title as the 2016 Australian Grand Prix’s Driver of The Day.
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