The Driver Database / Grand Prix Shootout poll

Stala, Short and Stanaway win the poll

The busiest month in Driver Database history has come to an end and we now have three winners of the Driver Database / Grand Prix Shootout poll. These three drivers have won free entry to the Grand Prix Shootout (worth £6,950) where they will be able to enter the assessment round and prove that they have what it takes to make it to the final. Nine drivers (eight from the assessment rounds + the winner of the 2009 Duratec Formula Ford Festival) will then spend a full day testing a Raikkonen Robertson Racing Formula BMW car with Rob Wilson and his team of driving instructors. The driver who performs the best during the final will win a paid seat with Raikkonen Robertson Racing in the 2010 Formula BMW Europe series and a real chance of making it all the way to Formula 1.

The three drivers who got the most valid votes in the poll were: Karline Stala (Latvia), Martin Short (New Zealand) and Richie Stanaway (New Zealand). Stala and Short were well clear of the rest of the field at the end but the battle for the third sport wasn't decided until the very last hours of voting when it was clear that the gap Stanaway had opened up the days before was just too great for the rest to catch up to.

There was lots of good campaigning going on by all the drivers making it to the top 20. Email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other online tools were of course big in getting votes but once those options were utilized many competitors started with the good old fashioned leaflet campaigns and knocking on doors. A few of the competitors offered a prize to encourage more people to vote for them.

Karline Stala, who crushed the competition with her large number of votes, thanks her friends and supporters at the marketing company RA Motorsport which started a very professional campaign for her that got big coverage in her country on the Internet, TV shows and on radio. Karline also hosted a competition where a lucky voter could win an autographed helmet!

Second placed Martin Short's campaign started off with an email chain and a Facebook campaign to get the word going. The biggest push came when he got his university to help him. They did a press release and shortly after Martin was interviewed by both the biggest newspaper in New Zealand and in his local paper. Not content with that he did one final effort and handed out flyers at his university and stood in front of lectures asking people to support him.

Richie Stanaway's campaign started out with a supporter spreading the word through email to 260 motorsport contacts throughout New Zealand as well as contacting every school in the area. The campaign led to mentions in motoring and motorsports magazines, local and national newspapers. Richie was also interviewed for four minutes on national television during the Sunday motorsport program and the local radio station ran interviews and reports during a few weeks.

With campaigns like these there's no wonder the old Driver Database server gave up and the new server sometimes was on the verge of collapsing.

Unfortunately some tried to abuse the voting rules instead of trying to get actual people to vote for them, so an ammendment to the voting rules to ban votes from email addresses created only for boosting the vote counts were made and such votes were filtered out from the results. This was after all a competition about getting the public to vote for their favourite drivers, not about fabricating votes.

I know that many of the competitors put a lot of effort into their campaigns and in a pefect world they would all be winners. Hopefully their hard work in getting the word out has made more people aware of who they are and getting their name out there will hopefully help them when it comes to securing funding for the next step in their racing careers. A lot of them will probably walk away from this with a much bigger network of contacts than they had before the month of September started.

The Top 20

The "Lap" Chart that shows the people in the final top 20 and their positions relative to one:

The voting trend during September:

Votes from the top 10 entrants, and the number of different IP addresses that voted for each of them. Please note that an IP address doesn't necessarily mean one person as big work places and schools often share the same IP address. But it does show that Driver Database can create staple diagrams as well as line diagrams!