[bart_spoon]

The issue is that the entire reason the competition exists is because the company is sponsoring it and putting forward the prize money so that the top performing models can then be put into production, thereby solving some problem the company has. This type of cheating is dishonest and against the spirit of the competition, but it also defeats the entire purpose of the exercise. Simply keeping a lookup table of answers for the data isn't machine learning, and will not generalize into a production system. As stated in the article, without these hacks, he wouldn't have even placed in the top 100.

To use your F1 analogy, this isn't the equivalent of tweaking the cars in whatever way possible is within the rules. This is the equivalent of completely cutting across the grass and bypassing 90% of the track, which is indeed illegal and would get you penalized.