Against the advice of many, dotdotdotcomma has chosen to throw its hat into the ring and have a stab at guessing the finishing order for this weekend's Australian Grand Prix.
The overwhelmed but underachieving members of the technical department opted to ignore all the higher-priority items on their ever-expanding "to do" list in order to develop some software which, they claim, extrapolates past performance in astoundingly clever, state-of-the-art ways to predict race results.
"With the corner up, it does," said a sceptical passing Robert Rankin fan.
Even some of the less cynical observers have questioned the wisdom of such a step at the start of a season where a combination of inconclusive winter testing, far-reaching regulation changes and a new tyre supplier have, according to AutosproutAUTOSPORT
 Autosport in the days when headlines were a bit easier to write. For a significant part of the population, Thursday isn't just that annoying day that you have to get through to reach Friday, but Autosport day. That's the day when "the world's fastest magazine" plops onto the doormats of motorsport fans worldwide and gives them something to read in the smallest room for the coming week. The magazine boasts some of the industry's most highly regarded journalists, a handful of star contributors in the shape of current and former drivers, pictures from the sport's best photographers and a cartoonist who makes us laugh about one week in ten. The Autosport empire also includes autosport.com, a site to which dotdotdotcomma is clearly hugely endebted, as well as the McLaren Autosport BRDC Young Driver Award for young British racing talent (yes, Susie Stoddart, we're looking at you) and the Autosport International show, to which we once somehow got tickets for press day.
The reasons against notwithstanding, the dotdotdotcomma editors have seen the prediction and have decided to spend the rest of the season violently disagreeing with each another about what it foretells. They are currently on the look-out for a couple of clever agents, in the optimistic hope that they will soon be able to book themselves life-long tickets on the gravy train.
For anyone interested, the prediction has the finishing order as follows. Just don't go blaming us if you take the ill-advised step of using this as the basis of a bet. 1 Jenson Button
2 Felipe Massa
3 Lewis Hamilton
4 Mark Webber
5 Michael Schumacher
6 Fernando Alonso
7 Nico Rosberg
8 Sebastian Vettel
9 Nick Heidfeld
10 Pastor Maldonado
11 Vitaly Petrov
12 Rubens Barrichello
13 Kamui Kobayashi
14 Paul di Resta
15 Heikki Kovalainen
16 Sergio Perez
17 Jaime Alguersuari
18 Jarno Trulli
19 Timo Glock
20 Adrian Sutil
21 Narain Karthikeyan
22 Sebastien Buemi
23 Jerome D'Ambrosio
24 Vitantonio Liuzzi And if you think this prediction is unlikely, you should have seen some of the earlier ones.
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