DarcyF1 News
New User Levelling System Is Here! 8 days
The new levelling system is finally here!
The centrepiece is the newly balanced XP curve that is designed to provide rewarding progress for new users discovering the site while also creating stretch-goals for the folks who have been here since F1 was broadcast in 4:3.
Previously, users could reach a maximum of rank 15 - this has increased to 50. The XP required for each rank has been changed - no matter which rank you were in the old system, your rank will have increased (or remained the same) in the new system, no user will have decreased in rank.
Ranking up - you will now be rewarded for every time your rank increases! The rewards you receive will increase in their value / rarity as your climb through the ranks. RankUp rewards will be available on your Rewards page and must be claimed / used within a week of receiving them. All users who have advanced their rank in the new system will have received all the RankUp rewards from all the ranks they would have passed through. If you were Rank 15, and are now Rank 39, you will have received all the rewards from Rank 16, 17, 18 and so on up to and including Rank 39. Over 25,000 rewards have been distributed in this way.
Please bear with us as we iron out any wrinkles and provide further enhancements based upon the new system. We know change can be a little unsettling for some people, if you're one of those people, please feel free to Redeem the promo code IHATECHANGE on your Rewards page.
You can find more information;
The ranks and the XP required to reach them on the Information page.
Your own progress towards the next rank on your Profile Page.
What rewards you will receive for your next rank on the Information Page.
New User Levels - Coming Soon 4 months
Soon, a new leveling system will launch on DarcyF1. This new system will provide a more rewarding and more challening leveling curve - providing more regular level up opportunities and deliver rewawrds on each level up! There will be more information on this soon.
As part of this new update, XP rewards will also receive a modest rebalance which will be taking place before the new leveling system launches. You may notice that the XP you and other members have may increase (there will be no decreases), as the rebalance will apply retroactively; for example, uploading a video to DarcyF1 will reward more XP than previously - so users who have already uploaded videos will have those XP rewards added to their total for each of their existing uploads.
Check back soon to hear more about the updated leveling system.
2025 End of Year 6 months
As the 2025 year draws to a close, we celebrate our tipping winners, our newest card set and look back upon the year.
2025 Tipping Results
Congratulations to everyone who competed in our Formula One and our Supercars tipping competitions this year! An extra special congratulations to our winners! Both competitions were fought hard and its great to see some new names join some familiar podium placers from last year. Results have been finalised, and rewards are now distributed.
Supercars 2025 - Results
Winner: @Britgt [1x X-Coupon, 2x Bingo Free Play cards, 1x legacy booster, 3x boosters, 1x Set 103 booster, 2500xp, 250 tokens]
2nd: @michael24 [1x Elite Coupon, 1x Bingo Free Play card, 2x boosters, 1x Set 103 booster, 1000xp, 100 tokens]
3rd: @Sando_94 [1x Coupon, 1x booster, 1x Set 103 booster, 500xp, 50 tokens]
Formula One 2025 - Results
Winner: @qwerty1 [1x X-Coupon, 2x Bingo Free Play cards, 1x legacy booster, 3x boosters, 1x Set 105 booster, 2500xp, 250 tokens]
2nd: @sketch7000 [1x Elite Coupon, 1x Bingo Free Play card, 2x boosters, 1x Set 105 booster, 1000xp, 100 tokens]
3rd: @Montoya42 [1x Coupon, 1x booster, 1x Set 105 booster, 500xp, 50 tokens]
Thank you to all who participated, and we'll be back to do it all again next year! If you'd like to see your results, please do so before the end of the year before the boards are cleared.
PaddockHillBend is also back with his newest set, "F1 1990 - Suzuka Showdown". Over 170 cards celebrating a season of bruised egos and dramatic rivalries. The set will be available from December 20 - you can get a head start with the promo code DEC2025 (redeem on your Rewards page) to claim a Set 109 booster pack. This code will be active throughout December.
This set will also be available across Bingo, Daily Quests and ThumbHunt Quests from 25/Dec through 31/Dec.
People's Choice!
Looking ahead to January, we are going to give you what you want - the card sets selected to be featured as prizes across Bingo, Daily Quests and ThumbHunt Quests will be chosen by you. Head across to the Voting page before the end of the year to get your votes in. Votes cost one Token each - vote as much as you want. The top three sets will be featured, and maybe a couple more (depending how big the winning sets end up being).
2025 in review
This year DarcyF1 turned 21 years old - suppose we're fully legal in most places on the planet now!
With ~30,000 new videos added to the site by our small group of committed contributors, 8,000 video comments, 15% growth in membership, 200,000 cards collected, 4,000 card transfers in the Card Exchange, 22,000 ThumbHunts completed, and all-time high website traffic (5 million visits, 50TB of data served for the year) - it's been a big year!
As we always say, thank you to all the users who visit and interact with the site - we wouldn't be doing what we do without you! Of course, a massive thank you to the 0.3% of members who uploaded content this year, and the 0.5% of members whose extremely generous donations helped pay the ever-increasing bills that keep DarcyF1 online.
If you're thinking you'd like to help DarcyF1 continue to operate into the future we are always looking for video uploaders, donators, feedback/suggestions and will always benefit from additional staff. Check out how you can help or submit an expression of interest to join our staff - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd8XsB7b-X-aXFLSgQdWu3LBTUTUNLMFovUE8Ai4VkGhffMGw/viewform
Happy holiday season to you, and we hope to see you enjoying the site for years to come!
(All dates and times referenced are UTC.)
2024 End of Year 1 year
As the 2024 year draws to a close, we celebrate our tipping winners, our newest card set and look back upon the year.
2024 Tipping Results
Congratulations to everyone who competed in our Formula One and our Supercars tipping competitions this year! An extra special congratulations to our winners! Both competitions were fought hard and its great to see some of our most committed tipsters finishing the season strong. Results have been finalised, and rewards are now distributed.
Supercars 2024 - Results
Winner: @RatBaG [1x X-Coupons, 2x Bingo Free Play cards, 1x legacy booster, 3x boosters, 1x Set 92 booster, 2500xp, 250 tokens]
2nd: @Mcwisa [1x Elite Coupon, 1x Bingo Free Play card, 2x boosters, 1x Set 92 booster, 1000xp, 100 tokens]
3rd: @Bloopy [1x Coupon, 1x booster, 1x Set 92 booster, 500xp, 50 tokens]
Formula One 2024 - Results
Winner: @Jasie [1x X-Coupons, 2x Bingo Free Play cards, 1x legacy booster, 3x boosters, 1x Set 91 booster, 2500xp, 250 tokens]
2nd: @Montoya42 [1x Elite Coupon, 1x Bingo Free Play card, 2x boosters, 1x Set 91 booster, 1000xp, 100 tokens]
3rd: @Jeroen [1x Coupon, 1x booster, 1x Set 91 booster, 500xp, 50 tokens]
Thank you to all who participated, and we'll be back to do it all again next year! If you'd like to see your results, please do so before the end of the year before the boards are cleared.
PaddockHillBend is also back with his newest set, "F1 1989 - A Broken Agreement?". Over 150 cards celebrating a tumultuous year for F1's greats. The set will initially be availabe in booster packs - you can get a head start with the promo code DEC2024 (redeem on your Rewards page) to claim a Set 96 booster pack. This code will be active throughout December.
The 2024 sets for F1, Supercars and Indycar will be available as prizes across all three games (Bingo, Daily Quests, ThumbHunt) from 25/Dec through 31/Dec.
2024 in review
This year DarcyF1 turned 20 years old! Amazingly, that's the same age as Facebook and a little older than YouTube - but not quite as well known. Back when DarcyF1 started, there were a couple of dozen videos that you could download and play in Windows Media Player (maybe Quicktime?) with probably a couple of dozen pixels of quality. Now the site hosts around a quarter of a million videos (~16TB), all uploaded by our small group of committed contributors.
With ~30,000 new videos added to the site, 6,000 video comments, 15% growth in membership, 250,000 cards colleted, almost 8,000 card transfers in the Card Exchange, 8,500 ThumbHunts completed, and all-time high website traffic (~100,000 unique visitors per month, ~50TB of data served for the year) - it's been a big year!
As we always say, thank you to all the users who visit and interact with the site - we wouldn't be doing what we do without you! Of course, a massive thank you to the 0.4% of members who uploaded content this year, and the 0.8% of members whose extremely generous donations helped pay the ever-increasing bills that keep DarcyF1 online.
If you're thinking you'd like to help DarcyF1 continue to operate into the future we are always looking for video uploaders, donators, feedback/suggestions and will always benefit from additional staff. Check out how you can help or submit an expression of interest to join our staff - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd8XsB7b-X-aXFLSgQdWu3LBTUTUNLMFovUE8Ai4VkGhffMGw/viewform
Happy holiday season to you, and we hope to see you enjoying the site for years to come!
(All dates and times referenced are UTC.)
Buddy Boosters + How NOT to launch a feature 2 years
Our newest card collecting feature has launched, Buddy Boosters allow you to benefit from your Friends' success! Each time a Friend of yours opens a Booster pack, you will also have the opportunity to collect a card from that pack. Boosters that your Friends open will be displayed on your Profile > Friends page for up to 24 hours (max. 3 at a time). You can see what cards they collected in their pack, and choose to pick a random card from that pack by spending your tokens.
We quietly launched this new feature while we monitored for any bugs.. and uh, we found one! As you may have noticed, this new feature introduced a bug that messed up every single user's token balance. Thank you to the one user who actually reported the problem using the Report Problem link. We have gone to the backups, restored user tokens to a known good point in time, and then re-applied all token transaction history from that point in time, giving us very good confidence that user balances have been restored to their correct amounts. However, there will be a ~40 minute period where your Token History is empty (and therefore couldn't be restored), also part of the same bug. Long story short, probably one of the worst bits of code we've pushed to the site in a very long time! Just in case your balance is a couple of tokens off, and to celebrate stupidity, please feel free to claim promo code IMANIDIOT this week for 250 bonus tokens, maybe you want to give Buddy Boosters a try! And hey, if you find any bugs, please report them!
Happy 20th Birthday! 2 years
That's right, 20 years ago today (April 1st, 2004) DarcyF1 was born! That makes DarcyF1 a bit of an antique in website years - we are two months younger than Facebook, a year older than YouTube, and in Formula 1 land, the only driver racing then and still racing now is Alonso!
We've been working on a little something over the past few months to celebrate the anniversary, and no, its not (just) the new DarcyF1 20th Birthday collector card - as you can probably tell, that photoshop job didn't take too long. Nor was it just those Promo Codes I hope you found over the past 8 days as we counted down. We've been working on a huge revamp of the collector card system. We know that most of our visitors are here to browse the 200,000 videos, but so many of our members put so much time into collecting our DarcyF1 Collector Cards.
DarcyF1 Collector Cards launched TEN YEARS ago, just before our 10th birthday. Since then we have seen the gallery grow to well over 5,000 cards available to collect. But, despite that growth, the Cards system was still mostly designed around having a handful of sets - maybe ~100 cards available at once. We've provided different ways to collect cards, Bingo, ThumbHunt, Daily Quests, boosters, gifting, promo codes and probably a few others, but at its heart, the original Cards system was built to encourage knowledgable motorsport fans to find these cards hidden amongst videos. To be able to see card, identify the featured place / person / occassion and then go and find a related video that gave them a shot at uncovering the card. With the limitations on the Cards system's ability to have so many cards findable at once, we lost a bit of that. Not to mention, in some instances (looking at you people who make video collections specifically for card hunting and then open up dozens of tabs at once, ha!) it was slowing down the performance of the site - that's not good for a majority of our visitors who just want to watch videos.
So, that's why we have rebuilt the Cards system from the ground up. Starting today, nearly all cards are available by browsing videos. That's a 2500% increase on available cards!
Cards are now more context-aware. Instead of matching on just one attribute (maybe the category, maybe the season..) they'll be closer tied to videos that match the featured subject(s) of the card. But you might be wondering, how can 'nearly all' cards be available when so many have past their 'available until' date (our "Legacy" cards). That's because we're extending 'Throwback Thursday' beyond the realm of Bingo, and on Thursdays, all Legacy cards can be found while browsing matching videos!
Furthermore, you might notice a new way to play cards to the Bingo boards - because our Cards are now more aware of what they feature, Bingo spaces may now ask you to play a card featuring Michael Schumacher, or Albert Park - opening up the potential for how you might complete that Bingo row!
Now, with so many more cards available, we've needed to look at rebalancing the Cards system - again, this hasn't been revisited for 10 years, back when we had <100 cards and we now have over 5,000. The following changes have been made using recent historical data to best determine the right balance; however, we will continue to monitor how the adjustments take affect and may tinker (slightly) with the below over the next little while.
Common cards will now be 1/10* odds (was 1/3).
Uncommon cards will now be 1/40* odds (was 1/30).
You can hold up to 4 of any card going forward (was 9) - the Bingo space requirement "All 9" will also be adjusted to "All 4", remember this space requires you to play all of that card, whether you have 4, 9, or 99.
Certain friend interactions like gifting Cards, or playing twice to a Bingo Board will be rate-limited.
Bingo Boards will be three hours long (was four hours).
Trading a cards will no longer have a chance of rewarding bonus XP.
The cooldown time* after 'hitting' a card (that is, finding a matching video but not collecting the card) and collecting a card will both have greater variability.
* these items are not static, and an element of randomness is included. Eg. One Common card might be running 1/11 odds, while another is 1/9 odds.
And yes, April 1st is really our birthday, and all the above is true - no April Fools' here (this year!).
Tipping Winners and End of Year Events 3 years
As the 2023 year draws to a close, we celebrate our tipping winners, launch new card sets (featuring you‽), and have big holiday events on the horizon!
2023 Tipping Results
Congratulations to everyone who competed in our Formula One and our Supercars tipping competitions this year! An extra special congratulations to our winners! The F1 competition came down to the final round making for an exciting finish with just one point deciding the win, while the Supercars competition was wrapped up with a couple of rounds to spare - one of the earliest wins across both tipping competitions on record. Results have been finalised, and rewards are now distributed.
Supercars 2023 - Results
Winner: @dantheracer99 [1x X-Coupons, 2x Bingo Free Play cards, 1x legacy booster, 3x boosters, 1x Set 84 booster, 2500xp, 250 tokens]
2nd: @Sando_94 [1x Elite Coupon, 1x Bingo Free Play card, 2x boosters, 1x Set 84 booster, 1000xp, 100 tokens]
3rd: @Bloopy [1x Coupon, 1x booster, 1x Set 84 booster, 500xp, 50 tokens]
Formula One 2023 - Results
Winner: @SuzukaMaster [1x X-Coupons, 2x Bingo Free Play cards, 1x legacy booster, 3x boosters, 1x Set 83 booster, 2500xp, 250 tokens]
2nd: @Jeroen [1x Elite Coupon, 1x Bingo Free Play card, 2x boosters, 1x Set 83 booster, 1000xp, 100 tokens]
3rd: @Mcwisa [1x Coupon, 1x booster, 1x Set 83 booster, 500xp, 50 tokens]
Thank you to all who participated, and we'll be back to do it all again next year! If you'd like to see your results, please do so before the end of the year before the boards are cleared.
December card events
As is a bit of a tradition, the 2023 sets for F1, Supercars and Indycar will be available as prizes across all three games (Bingo, Daily Quests, ThumbHunt) from 1/Dec through 24/Dec. The event-exclusive 2023 Supercars track cards will also make a comeback in the Card Exchange, with each available as a 500-token promo for two days (84.101 available 1-2/Dec, 84.102 on 3-4/Dec etc.). On 25/Dec, you're in for a bit of a treat, and 26-31/Dec will feature the other sets released in 2023 across all three games.
PaddockHillBend is also back with his newest set, "F1 1970s - A Decade For The Ages". Over 150 cards celebrating a transformation decade for the pinacle of international motorsport. The set will initially be availabe in booster packs - you can get a head start with the promo code DEC2023 (redeem on your Rewards page) to claim a Set 72 booster pack. This code will be active throughout December.
Cards featuring... you?
Have you ever wanted to be featured in a card set? Well, take a look in the DarcyF1 Forums for a chance to be part of PaddockHillBend's future card set focused on Members' Motorsport Moments. Maybe you will have a couple of cards with your DarcyF1 member name live here on the site for you to collect in 2024..
2023 in review
This year was undoubtedly a big one for DarcyF1, punctuated by the requirement to move the entire website to new infrastructure that meant for ~45 days we moved millions of files totalling around 7TB to new servers while rebuilding the site to work in a more modern environment.
Still, this didn't stop the sites continued growth. With over 20,000 new videos added to the site, 10,000 video comments, 10% growth in membership, half a million cards colleted, almost 10,000 card transfers in the Card Exchange, 6,500 ThumbHunts complete, and all-time high website traffic - it's been a big year! We're looking forward to 2024 where DarcyF1 anticipates reaching 20 years old!
As we always say, thank you to all the users who visit and interact with the site - we wouldn't be doing what we do without you! Of course, a massive thank you to our contributors that make the site what it is - our 40 video uploaders who put the effort into providing the 20,000+ videos, and our 19 extremely generous donators whose contributions helped pay the ever-increasing bills that keep DarcyF1 online.
If you're thinking you'd like to help DarcyF1 continue to operate into the future we are always looking for video uploaders, donators, feedback/suggestions and will always benefit from additional staff. Check out how you can help or submit an expression of interest to join our staff - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd8XsB7b-X-aXFLSgQdWu3LBTUTUNLMFovUE8Ai4VkGhffMGw/viewform
Happy holiday season to you, and we hope to see you enjoying the site for years to come!
(All dates and times referenced are UTC.)
Site Migration Underway 3 years
DarcyF1 is currently moving servers. While all site functionality should be (mostly) functional during the migration, the video content will take many days (likely weeks) to completely migrate across. Videos will not be viewable on the website until they have migrated to the new server meaning that you'll see vastly reduced video listings and search results. If the action / race / category you're looking for is not yet available, please check back at a later time. Generally, content is moving across category by category in alphabetical order.
All newly uploaded content will be available - thank you to our tireless uploaders who continue to provide content.
Thank you for your patience during this time, for more information, please see the thread in the Forums.
On the move 3 years
This is a brief note to let you know that over the next fortnight, DarcyF1 is migrating to a number of new services, including a new server for the website. This change hasn't been by choice and there has been months of work going on behind the scenes to give DarcyF1 the best chance of moving through this period.
There will be a number of teething issues as the site is migrated, including a period where some videos are not available while they added to the new server.
There will also be periods where certain features will be unavailable, including the ability for uploaders to provide content / modify existing content.
Further more, there will be at least one period of a few hours where the site is totally unavailable.
Thank you in advance for your patience, and the biggest thank you to our donators who are the only reason we can continue to pay the hosting bills, including the costly migration activity.
There will be more info to come later in the month. (Edit: forum thread now live)
Happy Holidays 3 years
As many around the world celebrate the holiday season, we too have been in the spirit of gift-giving with a surprise launch of a new card set from PaddockHillBend! A set featuring the premier North American open-wheel series during what was a defining decade, Indycar in the 90s, "A decade of drama and divison" is a massive set chronicaling the stories across the tumultuous 90s.
As you may have seen, gifts were delivered on time to all who visited DarcyF1 on December 25th.. but unfortunately the gifts could not be opened! This bug has been corrected, thank you to the users who reported the issue via the Report Problem button. The already-delivered gifts are available again on your Rewards page, with an extended expiry date - end of the year. The distribution's end time has not been adjusted. Sorry for the inconvenience!
The set will launch in totality in the new year!