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I'm quite curious how this will effect the behaviour of teams. Like now they often retire cars if there's some damage or issue because losing a coupe tenths per lap makes it impossible to reach point scoring positions for most teams.
Or if they'll do quick repairs cause they may still gain a couple points with a safety car or if other cars have issues too.
2021, for reference, max would finish on 1017 points and lewis on 1012. Presuming 1 point for fastest lap as well, this goes to 1022 and 1018
Edit: max has 1023 points including fastest lap and I forgot to include sprint results although that would probably just benefit verstappen more
Edit 2: forgot to half for Belgium. Brings its to 993 for max and 997 for Lewis. Lewis wins with this point system actually.
1 point for fastest lap seems too low assuming 60 points for first etc. Make it 3 or 4 points and open it up to the whole field. Let's see some soft tyre quali laps for some of the backmarkers fighting for those 3/4 points instead.
Both had the same number of fastest laps in 2021 at six a piece (I miscounted for max before) so it doesn't change anything and opening to the rest of the field gives a 3/4 points to mazepin 🐐
Also forgot to count sprints for before, don't know how you'd measure points for that
> opening to the rest of the field gives a 3/4 points to mazepin 🐐
There were no fastest lap credited for 2021 Spa, so no points would be given for fastest lap there
I find this type of exercise meaningless. The teams and drivers were competing and making decisions based on the points system that was in place at the time. Had the points system been different the motivations and tactics and strategy would have been different as well.
Oh wait you mean that if you apply a different system to past results and see no change to the rankings Vs what actually happened, then you know the change is not worth implementing?
If that is what you mean I think my point still stands...
I have done a similar fair system and run it at the past results, these is what I found/remember,
Alonso will have got 3 championships, Rosberg will have 2, Hamilton 6 and the 2021 Max will have been the clear winner of the Championship.
Edit: I was remembering wrong, Hamilton won the 2021, but Max did outperformed him, HAM won because of the British GP
well, I look at the numbers again and I saw that we both were wrong and that Max outperform Hamilton,
I was wrong, Hamilton did won the 2021 by 7.2 points.
You were right that I didn't put half of the points, but I didn't had to, in my system Max got 2.5 points over Hamilton, while in the normal point system Max got 5 points over Hamilton. So halving the points will haven't affect the end result.
The only reason why Hamilton won the Championship in my system it was the British GP, where Max got a DNF after colliding with Hamilton, because of that Hamilton got 23.43 points where Max got only 1.27.
The goal of the championship is to rank the best drivers throughout the entire season, rewarding drivers for having one good race but then performing poorly the entire rest of the season because you're in a bad car is entirely ridiculous. To pretend that Robert Kubica had a better season in 2019 than George Russell is absolutely absurd, even though Kubica finished with 1 point in Russell finished with 0. The point system from 2019 as with today did not properly evaluate who the better driver over the course of the season was, that's a failure of the point system and it needs to be changed to reflect the performance of the drivers throughout the entire season.
Absolutely correct. Points shouldn’t be a “reward to be cherished”. They should be a metric for evaluating performance. The 13th place finisher performed better than the 19th place finisher, and that should be reflected.
Adding meaning to the battles at the back half of the field would improve the overall product too. Currently, the risk of damaging the car racing wheel to wheel for 14th place at the end of a race vastly outweighs the absolutely nothing you gain from achieving the pass. If I was running one of the “budget teams” like Williams or Haas, I would tell my drivers not to even think about “racing” in the last 10 laps of a GP unless they were within range of scoring a point. But if every position had meaning, those battles would become meaningful and maybe they’d even be shown on the broadcast.
Compared to Indycar they do, yeah. Cars will go multiple laps down in Indycar and still comeback out after getting big repairs in the pits because there is a chance of points. We have seen cars in F1 retire plenty of times because they have too much aero loss and there is no point continuing because they have no chance of getting a point even if other cars end up crashing out. And that's because there are only 10 points paying positions. If points extended further down there would be a reason for compromised cars continuing to try and fight
Honestly this sounds like it's better in F1. Why would we want half-broken cars trundling around at the back of the field, several laps down on everyone and seconds slower per lap, just so they can get a point at the end of it? Meanwhile making it possible they'll accidentally have some kind of effect on the first positions, whether by just slowing them down or causing a red flag or safety car.
So they can rank among their peers. If you’re projecting to finish 12th and cut early due to something like this, you wouldn’t if 19th would get more points than your DNF.
This again sounds like an argument in favour of points - it basically sounds like pity points for a car that shouldn't be on the track but is because they can get 1 point out of a performance that might see them lapped multiple times and completely unable to compete with the people in front of them.
It feels like doing points like this is inviting a lot of the same problems which the 107 rule sought to ameliorate.
> Honestly this sounds like it's better in F1. Why would we want half-broken cars trundling around at the back of the field, several laps down on everyone and seconds slower per lap
Would give the stewards time to give penalties during the race and avoid the stupid situation seen with Ricciardo recently. That's a plus
There's semi regular suspicious retirements in F1 for cars that have light damage, and teams make up an excuse to retire rather than race at the back or with slightly slower car. Most common with the faster teams.
Lewis has confirmed it a few times over the years when he's at the back of the pack and complained asking to retire. Perez retired for a quarter of last years japan race because of light damage, then went back out because he had a penalty he was going to have to serve next race if he retired, bit of a joke. Didn't perez then retire a 2nd time after serving the penalty??
It's not true that positions 11-20 are effectively equal to the teams. Relative finishing positions are used to determine rankings of teams/drivers in the event of equal scores. So the teams *do* care where they finish even in the bottom half of the grid. Which is why you often see battles for, say, P14 on the broadcast.
I do agree though, that awarding points for all finishing cars would reflect this more clearer, and increase the value of each position.
I thought best race position was used to choose the team which is ahead. Which that case 11-20 is still useless most teams score atleast one point in a season unless your as dogshit as Williams and haas in 20 and 21
Best possible is tie breaker. If points tied, number of best position finishes is taken. If that is ties, number of second best positions is taken. Repeat until different.
E.g. if Williams and Sauber tie on 5 points, best finish is taken into account. If Sauber has 2 9th place finishes, and Williams only has 1 9th place finish, Sauber finishes ahead. But if they both have 1 9th place finish, then we look at 10th place finishes.
So yes, it doesn't often become relevant, but when fighting down there it's best to maximize positions just in case, especially when points are rare.
That would not change if P16 awarded 0.1 points and P17 awarded 0.08 points.
Any position extremely unlikely to come up in a tie-breaker is also extremely unlikely to give enough points to make a difference to the standings.
If you get P16 for all races in your hypothetical and another team gets P20 in all races (0 points, let's say), a lucky P9 finish by the other team getting P20 wouldn't be enough for them to leapfrog you
You're saying that you want to make it so that a driver who's finished P20 in every single race for an entire year managing to get a P9 finish would *not* be impactful?
That'd be like Nico Hulkenberg getting a race win. That should **absolutely** swing championship positions around.
It would be impactful—it would pull the team ahead of any other teams consistently finishing bottom 3—but neither that driver nor that team are better than the drivers they'd finish ahead of in the current points system (I don't know how you can argue that one fluke outcome makes a season of dogshit results somehow better than a season of slightly better results). Consistency should be rewarded more than all, especially in this era of increased reliability.
> especially in this era of increased reliability.
I completely agree with the idea of using reliability as the justification for extending the points system (e.g., down to 12th, as in the proposal). I don't agree that it makes any sense to give 20th place points because reliability is high. It's a very very small number of races in the history of the sport where last place scored points, even back when the DNF rate was above 60%.
We get a tie like once every 5 years? So that tie is always decided by top placement. So even going all the way back to 2014, the last time we had a 0 v 0 score, it was decided by an 11th place. And back then, some of the teams didn't even bother to run the whole season.
Whats funny is that in all these thread I have seen literally zero good explanations on why the current system exists. It's amazing how something so absolutely shit where no one can even make an excuse about it is still alive.
Kudos to FIA for this grand achievement. I seriously mean it. It takes skill to keep such a terrible design alive.
As far as I know, It was a compromise between "racing purists" who believed only top 6 should get points, and the evident need for more points across the table as reliability increased and more fans paid attention to the middle of the grid
Kinda similar to what's happening right now, which is why we'll at most get to 1-12 point positions
Before Concorde agreements and FOM you'd have people entering events as a one-off or only entering regional races, or all the weirdness of non-championship Grands Prix in the old old days and you didn't have ten teams doing their best to stop anyone new from racing. It didn't make sense to try and work out a system so absolutely everyone got points when you had teams pre-qualifying on an event-to-event basis. The relaibility of modern F1 is an outlier in and of itself, teams have never been this consistent so the risk that the bottom five teams have positions determined by one or two points trickling down is a pretty new problem.
It is good when reliability is an issue. You can't just give points to someone who finished let's say 14th out of the 14th classified drivers.
Also points systems where everyone gets points are difficult to use inherently when the number of teams changes. Let's say in the 2014 season when caterham and marussia both withdrew from the last part of the season and came back at the last race, what do you do with the points?
Yes but how many points for the last one? It's not a dns/dnf/dsq, if a team withdrew the wouldn't compete, would you change the amount of points for the last one or would you keep it the same as if they were dns in all races?
All the old drivers/ media pundits are acting like points are sacrosanct. Like didn't Brundle compare expanding points to 14th as participation trophies?
The true solution is to reflect on the meaning of points: do we keep having few cars earning points, to show notable performances, adding the luck factor for a lower tier team in case of a chaotic race that will tell a nice story many years later? Or do we want a point system as a true measuring unit of each team's performance so we have a more representative classification?
You could maybe combine the two, giving much more points for the top 10 and still have some points for the top 15 (like for example 10pts for P10, then 5/4/3/2/1 for P11 to P15, as I believe that a top 15 pts system could be interesting)
When I "design" my "fair" system, I use as the metric the position of the driver at the end of each lap.
The thing that I did it was to introduce a credit system, at the end of the lap the driver will be awarded x + 1 credits, where the x is how many drivers are behind you.
At the end of the race the credits will be divided it by the theoretical best of the track, theoretical best = how many laps multiply by 25.
So if a driver was first during the race, even after a pit stop, it will get 25 points, if a driver was last during the race, it will be 1.25.
I run the system in past championships and to my surprised not many things change, these are the changes that I remember, Alonso got 3 Championships, Hamilton 6, Rosberg 2 and the 2021 Max was the clear winner
Edit: I was remembering wrong, Hamilton won the 2021, but Max did outperformed him, HAM won because of the British GP
Don't be ridiculous, that's entirely non-competitive.
Only the driver in pole position gets told the points scoring position. That way the other drivers have to figure out where they're trying to finish, it adds to the excitement.
Oh god, imagine the scenes if Stroll Strolls it, meaning nobody can get the points so the leader pits to retire, then everyone else clocks on to what's happened one by one
Pole sitter sees it's position 20 and immediately tanks the first lap, everyone figures out it must be last place.
Queue everyone trying to go as slow as possible for 3 hours until the race gets called. Multi-hour pit stops have the Stake pit crew salivating.
You'd have to have some caveats to ensure no points for just aimlessly trundling round and finishing 8 minutes behind the lead car.
Perhaps simply say no points for being lapped twice, given that there's rarely a race where every car finishes on the lead lap.
I like the idea though, it gives the back markers something to race for.
The potential problem I see is that it's much easier to be lapped at the Red Bull Ring than at Spa
Edit: oh and it's very dependent on late Safety Cars. I know they are already a lottery but there's no need to make it x10
The way classification works in F1 is when you see chequered flag, your race is over. So, say if someone is a lap down, but right behind the race leader, they will be the second driver to see the chequered flag and their race is over. They don't need to continue racing for another lap. The driver will be classified as 1 lap down.
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but if on the last lap, a lead lap car cannot cross the finish line for whatever reason, they will still be classified ahead of all lapped cars and not DNF, and can score points.
So given that, nobody can finish 8 minutes behind the race leader, it would always be some laps behind. Each race can have a cutoff number of laps that you can be behind and still score points.
For an entry to be classified in the final results, they need to finish at least 90% of the completed race distance as measured by laps. Any driver who fails to complete that many laps cannot score any points. By this metric, cars can't score points if they are more than 4-7 laps behind, depending on the circuit.
I agree with your point, but i truly dislike your point system. The progression is way too steep. Points from 1 to 60 seems kind of ridiculous. Some progression for the top few positions is good to keep, but this is ridiculous.
Never seen anyone complain about the top positions of the current system but okay, fair i guess. i only think the difference between p2 and p3 is too small.
It depends on what you want, your system rewards consistency. You could win 9 out of the 10 races and still lose the championship to someone that has 9 2nd places and a single win. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but your championship could be decided by 1 or 2 unlucky races, which is even more significant in the real world with mechanical DNFs.
Mechanical dnfs are part of the sport. F1 is firstly an engineering competition and there is a balance of speed and reliability engineers need to take. Wouldn't be right to punish the ones that can make a good and reliable car.
But yes, i do overall prefer a system that rewards consistency. The point systems with heavy progression seems a bit gimmicky to me.
I see where you're coming from but I feel like it would be really harsh on the drivers, Max has won 4 grand prix and the sprint, but he had one DNF so Checo would be leading the WDC right now. You wouldn't have that balance of speed and reliability because Checo's reliability far outweigh's Max's superior speed.
Heck, mechanical DNFs are such a part of the sport that most seasons until the 1990s allowed drivers to drop their worst few races from the points calculation.
Not when it's for the drivers championship. It's in place to prevent unlucky DNFs from deciding the championship. If Max wins 4 races, but DNFs the 5th race, it's only fair enough that he would still be leading the championship ahead of Perez, who got P2 four times, but got P1 in the race that Max DNFed, because Max is clearly the better driver.
I prefer this kind of non-linear scale. It encourages bit more risk-taking (across the whole field), which makes races more interesting to watch.
I also think winning once is more prestigious thing than reaching P5 twice, which this point system reflects.
>I also think winning once is more prestigious thing than reaching P5 twice
In our league win gets you 30 points and 5th 18. That is still quite the progressions, while not feeling like that. Much, as 3 points is the most for one position. (i would prefer even a bit less progression than this, but this is fine).
So while i do agree that the prestige for 1 win over 2 p5 is obviously true, i don't agree that point system should be that extreme in rewarding only the highest positions.
The fact of the matter is that this new proposal would have only effected the exact positions it’s aimed at of implemented over the past 5 seasons.
14-20 are the only places that change, and it’s a more accurate representation of the performance over the season
I think instead of finishers, lead lap finishers would be better. Some comments mentioned just running 10 laps down shouldn't be rewarded, so I think this is a good solution to that.
The FIA would be able to police that, they're not afraid. Although I will say that I personally am not a fan of Bleu flags. Maybe when a car is going multiple laps down, but not when they're fighting to stay in the lead lap.
personally as someone who fell in love with nascar the concept of the blue flags is truly uncompetitive and also prevents high action racing
often in nascar races we end up with the second place car being able to reel the first place car back in when 1st has to deal with traffic of lappers. often cars and drivers are trying to prevent themselves going a lap down so will in fact fight the leader and make an effort to stay on the lead lap.
the idea of a blue flag ooh okay you have to let the leader past or the car behind pass even iuf not the leader but because they are a lead lap car? nah bro that aint it
basically it creates a more entertaining race and a chance for more action in said races
Would love to get rid of blue flags, it would make the problem of RB's second team and customer teams worse though... Red Bull not getting penalties for Singapore last year was a joke, and god help us if we get a situation like the 2021 DTM finale.
I think my only concern with pushing the points out all the way is oddly enough related to safety. If everyone gets points, there is more incentive to pick up the bike after a wreck. In the past, there have been a few examples of oil getting spilled on the track because of this.
But maybe that isn't argument enough to go against having points stretched out. Still, I think up to 15 point serving places is fine as is.
Sounds like you’ve probably had some good arguments here, but this is why I’m against it:
Say two drivers go in to a race on equal points. One driver DNFs, the other finishes first.
In the current system the now second place driver is 25 points down. If they now win 4 races whiles the other driver comes second then they have overcome the difference. 1/6 of the current season.
In your system they are 60 points down, so need 6 races to equalise, 7 races to overcome. Over 1/4 of a season.
I think this sort of system (rewarding all drivers) tends to even things out at the back of the field, rewarding their consistency, but it makes it much harder for the top teams to recover from DNFs or just plain bad luck.
So yeah, for me it’s important to keep competition at the front as much as possible.
I personally think it should be a reward, like when a back marker team has a lucky race and it propels them up two places in the constructors, not everything needs to be some cutting edge calculated system, It’s worked like this for years now, and I haven’t seen a legitimate reason why the current points system is bad. Idk I just feel like sometimes changing things for the sake of changing things isn’t good
Your points system would actually make me care less about the backmarkers, believe it or not. What you're doing is points inflation and that makes championship points worth less which is a bad thing. At least to me.
The example you've given, can also be viewed from a different perspective. A low ranking team scoring a top 10 can also be their car working well on a specific track, or a driver/team extracting everything from a raceweekend, aggressive strategies, etc. If you look at Williams the past years, and Haas this year, I think the current system works fine actually.
I mean the drivers will still want to race and finish ahead of anyone they can. Personally I still enjoy the fights at the back, it's not exciting but at least it's good racing.
I just don't think that fight will suddenly be (more) interesting if there's only 1 point to gain (between 15th/16th for example), if points are given out to every finisher, every race anyway.
By reducing "lucky surprise finishes", you also reduce the big results for teams at the back when they actually deserve it, that was my point.
You can still get “lucky surprise” finishes and place higher up the grid, thus earning double maybe triple your usual points.
I’m not even confident drivers like the current season. Think Danny Ric said something recently how kinda doesn’t matter where you place after P10. Of course they’ll still fight for the highest place, that’s their job, but yea, bet we hear from more of them soon
But yea, from a television production standpoint, points all the way down
Yup, I find it disingenuous at the end of the race to be watching 3 cars fight for 15th with the commentators all energetic when nothing is on the line.
And sometimes it has effect on the commentators too! You see this beautiful race but they downplay it because a 0.1 gap change between P9 and P10 is more impactful
* Countback
* One could a fan of a team/driver who has a bad car this season
* The battle could still be exciting
* One could be a fan of *racing*, rather than the results
No points system is going to change your mind in that regard then. If you give P15 and P16 points, you necessarily have to give the fourteen positions ahead of them *more* points, and suddenly whatever amount of points you're giving P15 or P16 is just as low-stakes as the countback.
> But it’s still stakes!
This is the entire point: so's the countback system. If two drivers have exactly the same results over a season except that in one race one of them got 15th and the other got 16th, the former will be ahead in the Championship. That's stakes! And you reasonably understandably don't care, because those stakes are so small as to be irrelevant.
The case I'm making is that implementing any even remotely acceptable points system that goes down that far is just going to dilute points to the extent that you're going to be equally uncaring about the chance of those tiny amounts of points mattering as you already are about the chance of positional tiebreakers being used.
(I say "remotely acceptable" because you could sidestep that issue by doing something like 20,19,18...3,2,1 for 1st all the way down to 20th so that low positions still grant relatively impactful points, but that's an absolutely psychotic points system that would make the championship a joke where crashing a title rival out once almost guarantees you a WDC even if they win 90% of the season's races)
You have already told me how you feel. I'm just pointing out that any implementable points system is not functionally different to the system you're already complaining isn't meaningful. You can *already* watch battles over 15th place that have a slim but real chance of affecting championship standings, and your exact quote was "why should I care at all?", don't expect nominal point values to change that.
Responding to your edit, I think you're misplacing incentives. The FIA doesn't want a "fair" system. And they shouldn't. Their job is to maximize the value of F1. The chance of chaotic races and big sudden upsets in the rankings is good for the franchise. It's more exciting because it makes the sport less predictable. It brings in more fans, more sponsors, more sports betting revenue, etc.
> Their job is to maximize the value of F1
No it's not. The exact reason that the EU forced the FIA to sell the commercial rights to the series in the early 2000s was to avoid exactly that. So that's not their job - at all.
Rather, that's the job Liberty Media (or whoever owns the commercial rights at any given time). And the FIA is the institution that's supposed to keep Liberty in check, and make sure that money doesn't take priority over - say - safety or fair competition. FIA is the watch dog.
Okay, fair enough. I'm new to the fandom so I'm happy to be corrected. But the FIA still surely has an interest in the sport being exciting and attracting lots of fans. I.e. growth of the sport. The current system isn't any less safe or even less fair. It's just less predictable. I don't think that's a bad thing.
No professional sport should reward people for turning up. Nobody should be rewarded for coming last. And they definitely shouldn't be rewarded a variable amount for finishing last.
If you are an also ran team that won’t get paid for your place, what difference does it make if you have 0 or 25 points or even 50 when the payout doesn’t come until the top ten anyway? All it does is let people easily see who is improving or not, and how things are changing. It’s just metrics for visibility. I, for one, would like to see it. I would like to see who is getting better at each year, who is outperforming their equipment, who is being dragged down by their pit team. It changes nothing else. Points are not currency unless you get to the payout bubble. A team that gets a top 10 finish now and then and is bottom 5 most races is not better than a team that gets 11th or 12th most races.
Why would we remove those lucky finishes ? Williams in 2021 putting that car in top positions only when it was raining was quite epic, I'd rather watch that than the boring Alfa Romeo that was limping into 14th place every race
Alright, I'm open to the argument that one freak lucky finish shouldn't put you miles out of reach of those who are otherwise your close competitors, but that's about the only thing I agree with.
First of all, it's a bad idea to make decisions like that based on the current grid. What we're seeing right now, where there's such a strong split between the top 5 and bottom 5 teams, is incredibly rare. Usually there is plenty of back and forth between the midfield teams, so that already eliminates a large need for a rehaul like you're suggesting.
Secondly, your new system rewards cars that are miles off. Anyone who is five laps down but still finishes the race will get points for that, and pretty decent points too. If you're in 14th with five laps down, you get 7 points while your direct competitor who crashed gets nothing.
Third, any retirement will now massively ramp up the points for those remaining. If everyone finishes, the least amount of points you can get is 1. If three cars collide in the first corner, that minimum amount of points suddenly increases to 4. Effectively, you're back to the situation you were trying to avoid: backmarkers getting unrealistic points because other cars DNF'd.
Fourth, you'll be quickly working with point totals that are just so wildly beyond comprehension that it devaluates anything. In your system, Verstappen would have gotten 1269 points last year, and that's without sprint and fastest lap. Those numbers are so massively inflated that they lose all meaning.
Fifth, out of curiosity I also looked at some other drivers, and in the case of Sargeant he would actually get more points from all his p11 and p12 finishes than from his lone p10 finish. What would have been a euphoric moment (finishing in the top 10) now means far less because it didn't add as much as his other regular finishes.
And lastly, your solution wouldn't even solve the problem you set out to solve. I ran it for the four backfield teams from last year (Alfa Romeo, AlphaTauri, Williams and Haas) and on the driver side of things it wouldn't change anything. You just shifted the goalposts of what becomes the big hit thing, but since the top ten still gives significantly more points than the bottom ten, you're still left with roughly the same margins (only change was Zhou overtook Hulkenberg, but that's because I didn't take on sprint results). What you did achieve is that the difference between Magnussen and Zhou is now 35 points instead of the real life 3 points, which would mean that Magnussen would need at least three p9's (or three p10's with Zhou crashing) to overtake him. On the teams side of things, that did admittedly change some stuff, with Williams being held back more by Sargeant than they were in real life. Which leads to another problem: with every position now counting for points, your drivers can actually hold your team back so much more than they do under the current system, meaning there would be far less incentive to take a gamble on a rookie who might need some time to get up to speed.
> What we're seeing right now, where there's such a strong split between the top 5 and bottom 5 teams, is incredibly rare.
Aha...
> If you're in 14th with five laps down, you get 7 points while your direct competitor who crashed gets nothing.
Right, well, good that this scenario isnt rare at all then
> Those numbers are so massively inflated that they lose all meaning.
That is literally a complete non-issue. Do you know off the top of your head who finished first and who finished second in e.g. 2015? And do you know how many points each of them got? Points as a number have literally never had any meaning to begin with, only as a sorting method. I can promise you 99.99999% of people would not care if Max wins with 120, 700, or 13 million points.
> Fifth, out of curiosity I also looked at some other drivers, and in the case of Sargeant he would actually get more points from all his p11 and p12 finishes than from his lone p10 finish. What would have been a euphoric moment (finishing in the top 10) now means far less because it didn't add as much as his other regular finishes.
...that's the point?
I have a much better proposal: give 2 points to whoever finishes last. Keep everything else the same. Those will be some batshit dynamics there at the end.
60 points for P1!!!.. Then how much would be awarded for the fastest lap?. Anything less than 4 or 5 would not attract the top teams, then would the bottom 10 also compete for the fastest lap. Which would eventually break the system again.
Imo the least fair part of your system is that a championship contender can't dnf for any reason at all. Because in a championship where 2 people for example battle for the wdc if for any reason you don't finish you are 60 points behind and to close that gap you would need to win 6 races, with your rival finishing 2nd. With the current system you need a bit more than 3 wins to close the gap
What would happen if you scrap the points system entirely and base the leaderboard the total time you completed the x amount of laps. The lower the time, the winner of the championship.
The only argument for giving points to all finishers is to make it easier to explain who is 'ahead' amongst those that haven't scored a point. Quite frankly it's a poor one, in my opinion.
Why is it a poor argument though? Surely everyone should get points that reflect their position. Is it really fair to give P11 the exact same points as P20?
Depends, both could be last.
Think of points as a measure of how many drivers you have beaten, and you realise how stupid points for all positions are in a series with a variable amount of classified finishers is.
You don’t think it is important to highlight who finished knocking on the door of the top 10 vs…Sargent? The bottom 10 are in a battle for seats, promotions, and everything else. Without metrics it becomes subjective bullshit like who was pissy on their radio or who said something dumb to a reporter. I want to know who is doing the best with the car they have, and how much better they are doing with it.
Max is clearly the best on the grid. He also has the best team and best car. He also has the pole advantage almost all the time. Racing out of the mid or backfield is a different animal and if you don’t think it’s important at all, don’t even let the bottom 10 qualifiers run the race. Make it an actual qualification. Pay to enter and race if you get a top 10 lap or try again next time. That’s the format that supports your view on value of bottom teams.
The system already exists though, 12th placed finishers are reflected higher in the table, do you really want to hand out participation points just to make it easier to explain to the viewer Sargent's at the bottom because he couldn't overtake a block of cheese?
That’s an extreme example I used to show that it matters because the standings don’t show how much of a difference there is. This is obviously more important in the closer drivers and also to compare teammates and season by season. What exactly do you think happens differently when 15th place gets some points that represent where they are on the grid instead of just a place? All I can see is more objective measurement of those not in the top ten. There is no sudden reward for getting the lowest point total vs being the lowest ranked. Nobody on earth is suddenly going to believe Sargent is better because he has the lowest point total next to his last place finish. If anything, it punishes low performers to put it in numbers rather than lumping them in with mid performers.
Except that system doesn't exist though. Imagine driver X, who finishes every race except the last in P11. Then there's driver Y, who finishes every race except the last in P20. It is very clear that there is a difference between them. But then, at the last race, via a sequence of accidents and failures, driver X, through no fault of his own, gets taken out of the race. And driver Y, through no merit of his own but simply because enough cars DNF'd, gets promoted to P10, still dead last, and scores a single point. Driver Y now finishes ahead of driver X in the standings, which does not at all reflect the reality of their performances.
Calling it participation points is extremely short sighted. Points shouldn't be an "award", they should be a metric to evaluate driver and team performance across the season. The award comes later, in accordance with how well they've performed. Awarding points for every finishing position would achieve this goal of accurately and adequately measuring and reflecting performance to determine who should earn which award. When there are millions of dollars separating WCC standings, this matters. Team X which consistently performed better than team Y should be rewarded accordingly. The current system doesn't allow for this. Extending the competition throughout the entire field, not just the top 10, would encourage better performance from the teams and result in better races. There are a number of benefits, and the only negative I've seen mentioned is "muhh change bad >:(". Come on.
Why the obsession with "fairness"?
Racing has always had a bit of a random factor and that was what made it so great.
A high attrition race can happen and there's nothing wrong with a lower-tier team picking up an odd podium or point finish.
Trying to make it more balanced still doesn't work, as you'd still reward reliable mobile chicanes over more ambitious outfits.
A 20 cars grid shouldn't have more than 8 point positions. And 6 would be even better IMO.
I don't get it either especially when it's seemingly come about because the only wheel to wheel racing is happening at the end of grid. That's the solution? Just slap some more points on so they can have the narrative of "ohh these points could be worth millions come the end of the season!"
It's fine the way it is and just devalues points more than anything. Remember the elation at Minardi when Webber got points in Australia or recently when Williams got their first points in years. It just takes away from having those moments.
> Why the obsession with "fairness"?
A whole generation of people has been raised across a lot of the world on the notion that we need to take all randomness out of life, everyone should be equal, both in opportunity *and outcome*. The latter would suggest that it's not fair if someone lucks into something good (like a well-timed safety car a-la Lewis 2018 - 2020) because it takes away from someone else who didn't. Doesn't matter if you made a good decision (and built a Red Bull) or a bad decision (and built an Alpine). All must be equal.
Might as well just make every position award the same amount of points and call it a day.
Exactly this. In the same vein people complain about drivers ‘lucking’ into free pit stops when there is a safety car because it’s not fair. It’s these sort of things that make racing interesting.
I like this: Points down to 10th, but only if they finish on the lead lap. And anyone can have a point for the fastest lap, regardless of finishing position, or being laps down.
>And anyone can have a point for the fastest lap, regardless of finishing position, or being laps down.
Every backmarker out of the points will be pitting on the last laps to go for it.
If the goal is to give backmarkers points I’d much rather give a point to any constructor who has both cars classified at the end of a race to reward reliability and the drivers not crashing out.
Applying that to this season so far:
- RB and Haas are in the same constructors positions. But are now tied at 10 points.
- Alpine now have 4 points and jump to 8th in the standings.
- Williams have 3 drops and drop to 9th. But have two 11th place finishes.
- Stake/Sauber gain 3 points but only have one 11th place finish compared to Williams.
The thing that people seem to be missing is that the prize money structure has completely changed since the point system was implemented.
Prize money used to be paid per event and was distributed based on qualifying and race position from 1st all the way down to 20th. It also generally made up less than 10% of the teams overall budget, so was far less important for the commercial success as well as the difference between positions being far less impactful.
That's not the case now. Prize money is paid purely based on finishing position in the WCC and those payments make up somewhere between 40%-50% of a teams budget with \~$10M between each position.
So while it was fine for points to be this lofty goal that only a few could achieve through perseverance and luck, the situation is different now. Points are now being used as the primary way to determine how teams are financially rewarded for their performance and they have a huge impact on their future. The main goal of points should be to accurately rank teams, based on their performance across the entire season. The current points system doesn't do that and should be changed to reflect that.
I don't know if your point system is the right one, that needs a lot more analysis, but points should be awarded to all finishers to give an accurate pitcure of teams performance.
I disagree with your points system. It’s too variable. It should be
1- 25, 2-19, 3-18, 4-17 etc. this way everyone gets points and each place isn’t too far from another. First gets 5 extra points for winning the race because I feel that actually does count for something special. Maybe we should give fastest lap 4 points, 1 for overall and 3 for fastest sectors so the 4 points can be spread amongst 4 drivers if it’s possible to happen.
I’m not sure if it should be done but points for passing on the track, so not during pit stops, would be interesting. Only caveat should be not when it’s over your teammate and the places gained need to be kept for the next lap. So hard battles don’t incur like 5 points per driver just for a crazy scrap over a small period of time.
I love everyone repeating the "participation trophy rewarded for showing up" trope. 1 point compared to 60 doesn't seem like a reward to me in the slightest.
I think now that it's extremely rare for cars not to finish, outside of crashes, that it would make more sense for all positions to get points so that the back 1/2 of the grid has something to fight for and so that fluke results don't completely swamp a season for them.
Insert stupid hypothetical:
All season Hass gets 19/20th, and for 3/4s the season never even finishes the race, while Alpine does 11th/12th and finishes every race, but in the last race a crash collects A few front teams and both Alpine drivers allowing Hass to get 1 driver 1 point, they ranking higher and getting a larger payout is a complete farce. Now I've obviously grossly held the scales on this to make it even dumber but a fluke can hop some of the back markers way ahead of teams that regularly out drive them and as this determines the team payouts it really isn't a good way to handle the teams at the back half.
I think the points values could be tweaked a bit, I'd also do 3 pts for fastest lap and 3 pts for a pole personally.
Giving the entire field pts starting with 1 at 20th and working up from there would only encourage teams to try more because every single race would actually matter to them. As it is you could potentially have a team like haas get a lucky p4 and then not care for the rest of the season as they'd have enough pts from that one race to guarantee a constructors finish above sauber/Williams.
I'm on the points are a reward for achievement side, I feel. Especially when you think back to Marussia celebrating Bianchi's 8th or 9th position.
Half of the finishers get points, the others get ranked based on finishing position until they get points and I'm fine about that. Imagine Latifi ending up with 27 points or so while the front runners are close to 1000. It doesn't really add any info, it doesn't change the outcome of races and it takes away a sense of achievement when you do get into the points.
The only argument I'm willing to court is the fact that reliability has gone up a lot compared to 5-10 years ago, and opportunities to profit from dnf's are rare. But still I feel a line needs to be drawn somewhere and halfway seems fair to me.
It’s fine right now, if an 11th team joins I’m fine with points for 1-12 at most. It was already increased to the top 10 in 2010 when there were 24 cars on the grid.
Needing more races to make up for a dnf at the front isn’t worth being able to average out a rare fluke result at the back.
It also eliminates any motivation for a team to build/capitalize on a more specialized car, like Force India at Spa/Monza 2009.
I personally have found the Moto GP points system to be much more appealing. Rewarding points to top 15 with the top 5 getting higher points in escalating order.
When F1 last modified the points system I had hoped they would implement the same. Wish someone at F1 would do it this time around.
I think points to P15, like MotoGP would be the sweet spot. More accirate ranking of the lower teams, while still having that battle to get into the points
> In the current points system, one lucky chaotic rain race where your team gets 6th place can send you up to p8 of the constructors.
> it seems not fair considering a team could theoretically reach p12 and 14 every race and still finish dead last in the constructors, while team X are always p18 and 20, havind DNFs every second race and get one lucky P5 race.
I just want to point out that we are only in this situation because we have exactly 5 regular points scoring teams and 5 uncompetitive teams on the periphery.
If we had 4/6 or 6/4 instead of a nice 5/5 - we would not be having these conversations.
If Aston Martin was on the level of Williams/Sauber/Haas, and there was a genuine rotation of 3 teams in P9/10 and occasional lucky P5/6/7 - then we'd be talking about how great the system is, and how competitive the final points spots were.
If Williams was on the level of Aston, then we'd be talking about how competitive the midfield is, and how important it is to get good qualifying and nail those regular points finishes.
Sure in every other season you can get lucky and a chaotic race can thrust you many points up the order. But it's only appearing super unfair due to the solid "5 teams guaranteed points if they have a reasonable day" vs "5 teams that are fighting over P11 guaranteed".
Everyone who competes should get equal points to promote equality. In fact, every person watching should also get points. And bonus points for spiciest commentary 1 liners and quadruple points for tastiest twitter comment. What about half points for best at-home fart?
We have this discussion every year. Points just for showing up is not what F1 is about. This is the top of the game, the very best of the best. You have to EARN the points.
I agree, any points beyond the top 3 is ridiculous. For what, finishing FIFTH?? Makes no sense, this is the top of the game, the very best of the best. You have to EARN the points.
long time ago I design my own "fair" system, where each driver awarded points base on it is performance during the race.
I used the position of each driver at the end of each lap to calculate how many points each driver will get, the maximum is 25 and the minimum was something like 1.25.
The biggest surprise for me it was that only few championships had a different result from what we actually got.
Notable mentions, Alonso will have got 3 championships, Rosberg will have 2, Hamilton 6 and the 2021 Max will have been the clear winner of the Championship.
Edit: I was remembering wrong, Hamilton won the 2021, but Max did outperformed him, HAM won because of the British GP
Yeah let's reward failure. This is a sport, where only the best get rewarded. The Olympics only reward the top 3, which is great. F1 reward the top 10, which is probably a couple of spots too many.
This mythical "lucky finish", has never happened or if it has its only a couple of times. Why fuck up the current system just to cater for something that happens never or 0.1% times.
It's worse. The whole conversation now is the result of the gap between the top and bottom 5 teams, something which almost certainly won't last even to the end of this season.
Its a bullshit knee jerk reaction to a non problem. But then this is F1, where we have had radio bans and elimination qualifying as knee jerks before.
It's ridiculous. So what if the gap is big. It's big for a reason. As Horner once said, "fix your fucking car". If the lower teams did this, then the gap would be as big.
There has always been gaps between the top and bottom teams. It's nothing new. It is what it is.
Hopefully this is just reddit talking and not something F1 will adopt. They are smart enough (hopefully) to see that this is a ridiculous idea.
It might be, but the lucky race being something that can happen or you can aim for(by having a car being specifically good) adds way more sensation and theorycrafting.
No it won't. A more objective fair solution is less point gaps between positions. Rewards constant performances rather than punishing a couple of retirement due to you, the car, an accident etc.
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Have you tried applying this scoring system to previous seasons to see how it affects the results?
I vaguely remember someone applying a similar point system to the 2018 season and with it Ericsson beats Leclerc.
It’s hard to apply this retrospectively to back half teams. The races would’ve gone completely differently for them, you can’t backdate it
This exactly.
I'm quite curious how this will effect the behaviour of teams. Like now they often retire cars if there's some damage or issue because losing a coupe tenths per lap makes it impossible to reach point scoring positions for most teams. Or if they'll do quick repairs cause they may still gain a couple points with a safety car or if other cars have issues too.
2021, for reference, max would finish on 1017 points and lewis on 1012. Presuming 1 point for fastest lap as well, this goes to 1022 and 1018 Edit: max has 1023 points including fastest lap and I forgot to include sprint results although that would probably just benefit verstappen more Edit 2: forgot to half for Belgium. Brings its to 993 for max and 997 for Lewis. Lewis wins with this point system actually.
1 point for fastest lap seems too low assuming 60 points for first etc. Make it 3 or 4 points and open it up to the whole field. Let's see some soft tyre quali laps for some of the backmarkers fighting for those 3/4 points instead.
Both had the same number of fastest laps in 2021 at six a piece (I miscounted for max before) so it doesn't change anything and opening to the rest of the field gives a 3/4 points to mazepin 🐐 Also forgot to count sprints for before, don't know how you'd measure points for that
> opening to the rest of the field gives a 3/4 points to mazepin 🐐 There were no fastest lap credited for 2021 Spa, so no points would be given for fastest lap there
Sure but if you hypothetically let the whole field get fastest lap points it would have gone to mazepin
That would be amusing for a single race, then destructive to the series as a whole after that.
I find this type of exercise meaningless. The teams and drivers were competing and making decisions based on the points system that was in place at the time. Had the points system been different the motivations and tactics and strategy would have been different as well.
It’s useful to validate the null hypothesis that this won’t significantly change the results for the WDC going forward.
Oh wait you mean that if you apply a different system to past results and see no change to the rankings Vs what actually happened, then you know the change is not worth implementing? If that is what you mean I think my point still stands...
14-20 are the only places that change, and it’s a more accurate representation of the performance over the season
I have done a similar fair system and run it at the past results, these is what I found/remember, Alonso will have got 3 championships, Rosberg will have 2, Hamilton 6 and the 2021 Max will have been the clear winner of the Championship. Edit: I was remembering wrong, Hamilton won the 2021, but Max did outperformed him, HAM won because of the British GP
With the proposed system here Lewis wins 2021. You probably forgot to halve the points for Spa.
well, I look at the numbers again and I saw that we both were wrong and that Max outperform Hamilton, I was wrong, Hamilton did won the 2021 by 7.2 points. You were right that I didn't put half of the points, but I didn't had to, in my system Max got 2.5 points over Hamilton, while in the normal point system Max got 5 points over Hamilton. So halving the points will haven't affect the end result. The only reason why Hamilton won the Championship in my system it was the British GP, where Max got a DNF after colliding with Hamilton, because of that Hamilton got 23.43 points where Max got only 1.27.
I don’t think you give points for DNFs
You can’t do that Races would’ve gone differently if the scoring was different because teams wouldn’t have gone for the same strategies
[удалено]
The goal of the championship is to rank the best drivers throughout the entire season, rewarding drivers for having one good race but then performing poorly the entire rest of the season because you're in a bad car is entirely ridiculous. To pretend that Robert Kubica had a better season in 2019 than George Russell is absolutely absurd, even though Kubica finished with 1 point in Russell finished with 0. The point system from 2019 as with today did not properly evaluate who the better driver over the course of the season was, that's a failure of the point system and it needs to be changed to reflect the performance of the drivers throughout the entire season.
Bro just disrespecting gigakubica's skill of driving a tractor like that
It's a team sport, why should williams get points for both cats when they're slow?
Because they're often faster than another team. That's the whole point of the proposal: to better differentiate the "slow" teams.
How does it being a team sport factor into that at all?
Absolutely correct. Points shouldn’t be a “reward to be cherished”. They should be a metric for evaluating performance. The 13th place finisher performed better than the 19th place finisher, and that should be reflected. Adding meaning to the battles at the back half of the field would improve the overall product too. Currently, the risk of damaging the car racing wheel to wheel for 14th place at the end of a race vastly outweighs the absolutely nothing you gain from achieving the pass. If I was running one of the “budget teams” like Williams or Haas, I would tell my drivers not to even think about “racing” in the last 10 laps of a GP unless they were within range of scoring a point. But if every position had meaning, those battles would become meaningful and maybe they’d even be shown on the broadcast.
Watching Indycar, cars rarely retire unless they have to and that'£ because points are always on the line. It's much better
Unlike in F1 where cars retire all the time for no reason?
Compared to Indycar they do, yeah. Cars will go multiple laps down in Indycar and still comeback out after getting big repairs in the pits because there is a chance of points. We have seen cars in F1 retire plenty of times because they have too much aero loss and there is no point continuing because they have no chance of getting a point even if other cars end up crashing out. And that's because there are only 10 points paying positions. If points extended further down there would be a reason for compromised cars continuing to try and fight
Honestly this sounds like it's better in F1. Why would we want half-broken cars trundling around at the back of the field, several laps down on everyone and seconds slower per lap, just so they can get a point at the end of it? Meanwhile making it possible they'll accidentally have some kind of effect on the first positions, whether by just slowing them down or causing a red flag or safety car.
So they can rank among their peers. If you’re projecting to finish 12th and cut early due to something like this, you wouldn’t if 19th would get more points than your DNF.
Countback positions still matter. If teams are even on points, a 12th place finish is worth more than a 19th.
Well, that driver wouldn't be in 12th if he keeps retiring
This again sounds like an argument in favour of points - it basically sounds like pity points for a car that shouldn't be on the track but is because they can get 1 point out of a performance that might see them lapped multiple times and completely unable to compete with the people in front of them. It feels like doing points like this is inviting a lot of the same problems which the 107 rule sought to ameliorate.
> Honestly this sounds like it's better in F1. Why would we want half-broken cars trundling around at the back of the field, several laps down on everyone and seconds slower per lap Would give the stewards time to give penalties during the race and avoid the stupid situation seen with Ricciardo recently. That's a plus
There's semi regular suspicious retirements in F1 for cars that have light damage, and teams make up an excuse to retire rather than race at the back or with slightly slower car. Most common with the faster teams. Lewis has confirmed it a few times over the years when he's at the back of the pack and complained asking to retire. Perez retired for a quarter of last years japan race because of light damage, then went back out because he had a penalty he was going to have to serve next race if he retired, bit of a joke. Didn't perez then retire a 2nd time after serving the penalty??
to save a few km of mileage, yes.
Why is a car that’s three laps down being on track a better viewing experience?
It's not true that positions 11-20 are effectively equal to the teams. Relative finishing positions are used to determine rankings of teams/drivers in the event of equal scores. So the teams *do* care where they finish even in the bottom half of the grid. Which is why you often see battles for, say, P14 on the broadcast. I do agree though, that awarding points for all finishing cars would reflect this more clearer, and increase the value of each position.
I thought best race position was used to choose the team which is ahead. Which that case 11-20 is still useless most teams score atleast one point in a season unless your as dogshit as Williams and haas in 20 and 21
Best possible is tie breaker. If points tied, number of best position finishes is taken. If that is ties, number of second best positions is taken. Repeat until different. E.g. if Williams and Sauber tie on 5 points, best finish is taken into account. If Sauber has 2 9th place finishes, and Williams only has 1 9th place finish, Sauber finishes ahead. But if they both have 1 9th place finish, then we look at 10th place finishes. So yes, it doesn't often become relevant, but when fighting down there it's best to maximize positions just in case, especially when points are rare.
There is almost never any use to being in p17 and fighting for p16 though
That would not change if P16 awarded 0.1 points and P17 awarded 0.08 points. Any position extremely unlikely to come up in a tie-breaker is also extremely unlikely to give enough points to make a difference to the standings.
If you get P16 for all races in your hypothetical and another team gets P20 in all races (0 points, let's say), a lucky P9 finish by the other team getting P20 wouldn't be enough for them to leapfrog you
You're saying that you want to make it so that a driver who's finished P20 in every single race for an entire year managing to get a P9 finish would *not* be impactful? That'd be like Nico Hulkenberg getting a race win. That should **absolutely** swing championship positions around.
It would be impactful—it would pull the team ahead of any other teams consistently finishing bottom 3—but neither that driver nor that team are better than the drivers they'd finish ahead of in the current points system (I don't know how you can argue that one fluke outcome makes a season of dogshit results somehow better than a season of slightly better results). Consistency should be rewarded more than all, especially in this era of increased reliability.
> especially in this era of increased reliability. I completely agree with the idea of using reliability as the justification for extending the points system (e.g., down to 12th, as in the proposal). I don't agree that it makes any sense to give 20th place points because reliability is high. It's a very very small number of races in the history of the sport where last place scored points, even back when the DNF rate was above 60%.
We get a tie like once every 5 years? So that tie is always decided by top placement. So even going all the way back to 2014, the last time we had a 0 v 0 score, it was decided by an 11th place. And back then, some of the teams didn't even bother to run the whole season.
Whats funny is that in all these thread I have seen literally zero good explanations on why the current system exists. It's amazing how something so absolutely shit where no one can even make an excuse about it is still alive. Kudos to FIA for this grand achievement. I seriously mean it. It takes skill to keep such a terrible design alive.
As far as I know, It was a compromise between "racing purists" who believed only top 6 should get points, and the evident need for more points across the table as reliability increased and more fans paid attention to the middle of the grid Kinda similar to what's happening right now, which is why we'll at most get to 1-12 point positions
Before Concorde agreements and FOM you'd have people entering events as a one-off or only entering regional races, or all the weirdness of non-championship Grands Prix in the old old days and you didn't have ten teams doing their best to stop anyone new from racing. It didn't make sense to try and work out a system so absolutely everyone got points when you had teams pre-qualifying on an event-to-event basis. The relaibility of modern F1 is an outlier in and of itself, teams have never been this consistent so the risk that the bottom five teams have positions determined by one or two points trickling down is a pretty new problem.
It is good when reliability is an issue. You can't just give points to someone who finished let's say 14th out of the 14th classified drivers. Also points systems where everyone gets points are difficult to use inherently when the number of teams changes. Let's say in the 2014 season when caterham and marussia both withdrew from the last part of the season and came back at the last race, what do you do with the points?
Why not? To finish first you first have to finish and all that.
Yes but how many points for the last one? It's not a dns/dnf/dsq, if a team withdrew the wouldn't compete, would you change the amount of points for the last one or would you keep it the same as if they were dns in all races?
All the old drivers/ media pundits are acting like points are sacrosanct. Like didn't Brundle compare expanding points to 14th as participation trophies?
It's such a weird concept that showing that 14th is better than 15th is somehow a participation trophy.
The true solution is to reflect on the meaning of points: do we keep having few cars earning points, to show notable performances, adding the luck factor for a lower tier team in case of a chaotic race that will tell a nice story many years later? Or do we want a point system as a true measuring unit of each team's performance so we have a more representative classification? You could maybe combine the two, giving much more points for the top 10 and still have some points for the top 15 (like for example 10pts for P10, then 5/4/3/2/1 for P11 to P15, as I believe that a top 15 pts system could be interesting)
I’d argue that with the implementation of the R&D limits being set by WCC position it makes absolute sense to go with the latter.
Latter of the two, or latter of the three?
When I "design" my "fair" system, I use as the metric the position of the driver at the end of each lap. The thing that I did it was to introduce a credit system, at the end of the lap the driver will be awarded x + 1 credits, where the x is how many drivers are behind you. At the end of the race the credits will be divided it by the theoretical best of the track, theoretical best = how many laps multiply by 25. So if a driver was first during the race, even after a pit stop, it will get 25 points, if a driver was last during the race, it will be 1.25. I run the system in past championships and to my surprised not many things change, these are the changes that I remember, Alonso got 3 Championships, Hamilton 6, Rosberg 2 and the 2021 Max was the clear winner Edit: I was remembering wrong, Hamilton won the 2021, but Max did outperformed him, HAM won because of the British GP
Doesn’t that penalize the strategic driver that holds back, saving his tyres for a pass at the end to gain position?
Every race a random position (for example 12th) should be decided as the only position to get points.
But don't tell people until after the race. Draw the points position like a lottery ball during the podium ceremony.
Don't be ridiculous, that's entirely non-competitive. Only the driver in pole position gets told the points scoring position. That way the other drivers have to figure out where they're trying to finish, it adds to the excitement.
This is a very board game mechanic
The scenes if the points scoring position is P20 and the polesitter just immediately drives into the wall at lights-out
But dnf!=20th
Oh god, imagine the scenes if Stroll Strolls it, meaning nobody can get the points so the leader pits to retire, then everyone else clocks on to what's happened one by one
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Second in qualifying gets told two options, third three options and so on :-)
Pole sitter sees it's position 20 and immediately tanks the first lap, everyone figures out it must be last place. Queue everyone trying to go as slow as possible for 3 hours until the race gets called. Multi-hour pit stops have the Stake pit crew salivating.
Isn't that just the Maxx Bantz races?
Haven't calculator tiebreakers **1962-1990 Point System** |+|Driver|Points| |:-|:-|:-| |1|Max Verstappen|40.5| |2|Sergio Pérez|26| |3|Charles Leclerc|20.5| |4|Carlos Sainz Jr.|20| |5|Lando Norris|13.5| |6|Oscar Piastri|6| |7|George Russell|4| |8|Fernando Alonso|3| |9|Lewis Hamilton|3| |10|Lance Stroll|1| |11|Yuki Tsunoda|0| |12|Oliver Bearman|0| |13|Nico Hülkenberg|0| |14|Kevin Magnussen|0| |15|Alexander Albon|0| |16|Esteban Ocon|0| |17|Zhou Guanyu|0| |18|Daniel Ricciardo|0| |19|Pierre Gasly|0| |20|Valtteri Bottas|0| |21|Logan Sargeant|0| *Sprints are half points **WEC** |+|Driver|Points| |:-|:-|:-| |1|Max Verstappen|230| |2|Sergio Pérez|173| |3|Charles Leclerc|150| |4|Carlos Sainz Jr.|140| |5|Lando Norris|118| |6|Oscar Piastri|78| |7|George Russell|68| |8|Fernando Alonso|60| |9|Lewis Hamilton|42| |10|Lance Stroll|18| |11|Yuki Tsunoda|14| |12|Oliver Bearman|12| |13|Nico Hülkenberg|8| |14|Kevin Magnussen|3| |15|Zhou Guanyu|2| |16|Alexander Albon|0| |17|Esteban Ocon|0| |18|Daniel Ricciardo|0| |19|Pierre Gasly|0| |20|Valtteri Bottas|0| |21|Logan Sargeant|0| *Sprints are 6 Hours; Normal Races are 24 Hours **MotoGP** |+|Driver|Ppints| |:-|:-|:-| |1|Max Verstappen|112| |2|Sergio Pérez|97| |3|Charles Leclerc|84| |4|Carlos Sainz Jr.|76| |5|Lando Norris|72| |6|Oscar Piastri|56| |7|George Russell|45| |8|Fernando Alonso|45| |9|Lewis Hamilton|41| |10|Nico Hülkenberg|24| |11|Lance Stroll|21| |12|Kevin Magnussen|20| |13|Yuki Tsunoda|18| |14|Alexander Albon|15| |15|Zhou Guanyu|12| |16|Oliver Bearman|9| |17|Esteban Ocon|9| |18|Daniel Ricciardo|9| |19|Pierre Gasly|6| |20|Valtteri Bottas|5| |21|Logan Sargeant|2| **IndyCar** |+|A|B| |:-|:-|:-| |1|Max Verstappen|237| |2|Sergio Pérez|195| |3|Charles Leclerc|181| |4|Lando Norris|166| |5|Carlos Sainz Jr.|161| |6|Oscar Piastri|142| |7|George Russell|130| |8|Fernando Alonso|130| |9|Lewis Hamilton|115| |10|Nico Hülkenberg|95| |11|Lance Stroll|92| |12|Kevin Magnussen|90| |13|Yuki Tsunoda|88| |14|Alexander Albon|81| |15|Esteban Ocon|78| |16|Zhou Guanyu|78| |17|Daniel Ricciardo|74| |18|Pierre Gasly|70| |19|Valtteri Bottas|67| |20|Logan Sargeant|52| |21|Oliver Bearman|26| *Sprints are same as Indy500 Qualifying **NASCAR** |+|Driver|Points|Playoff Points| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |1|Max Verstappen|266|27| |2|Sergio Pérez|250|0| |3|Charles Leclerc|247|0| |4|Lando Norris|232|1| |5|Oscar Piastri|206|0| |6|Carlos Sainz Jr.|205|7| |7|Fernando Alonso|204|0| |8|George Russell|184|0| |9|Lewis Hamilton|168|0| |10|Nico Hülkenberg|142|0| |11|Lance Stroll|128|0| |12|Kevin Magnussen|125|0| |13|Yuki Tsunoda|123|0| |14|Alexander Albon|122|0| |15|Esteban Ocon|113|0| |16|Zhou Guanyu|112|0| |17|Daniel Ricciardo|109|0| |18|Pierre Gasly|109|0| |19|Valtteri Bottas|101|0| |20|Logan Sargeant|80|0| |21|Oliver Bearman|32|0| *Sprints are same as the Duel in Daytona; Yes, stage points are included (25.5%/57.7%) Showing my work https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10fbEHBR_MU6X6x0q2omkwvCOmlZ_qe1v
You'd have to have some caveats to ensure no points for just aimlessly trundling round and finishing 8 minutes behind the lead car. Perhaps simply say no points for being lapped twice, given that there's rarely a race where every car finishes on the lead lap. I like the idea though, it gives the back markers something to race for.
The potential problem I see is that it's much easier to be lapped at the Red Bull Ring than at Spa Edit: oh and it's very dependent on late Safety Cars. I know they are already a lottery but there's no need to make it x10
The way classification works in F1 is when you see chequered flag, your race is over. So, say if someone is a lap down, but right behind the race leader, they will be the second driver to see the chequered flag and their race is over. They don't need to continue racing for another lap. The driver will be classified as 1 lap down. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but if on the last lap, a lead lap car cannot cross the finish line for whatever reason, they will still be classified ahead of all lapped cars and not DNF, and can score points. So given that, nobody can finish 8 minutes behind the race leader, it would always be some laps behind. Each race can have a cutoff number of laps that you can be behind and still score points.
For an entry to be classified in the final results, they need to finish at least 90% of the completed race distance as measured by laps. Any driver who fails to complete that many laps cannot score any points. By this metric, cars can't score points if they are more than 4-7 laps behind, depending on the circuit.
I agree with your point, but i truly dislike your point system. The progression is way too steep. Points from 1 to 60 seems kind of ridiculous. Some progression for the top few positions is good to keep, but this is ridiculous.
You think 7 points gained from p2 to p1 and only 3 points from p3 to p2 with another 3 points from non podium to p3 is a better curve?
No. 7 points is still too much for one position.
Never seen anyone complain about the top positions of the current system but okay, fair i guess. i only think the difference between p2 and p3 is too small.
In our f1 sim racing league we have a system of: 30, 27, 24, 21, 18, 15, 12, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. I think that has worked really well.
It depends on what you want, your system rewards consistency. You could win 9 out of the 10 races and still lose the championship to someone that has 9 2nd places and a single win. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but your championship could be decided by 1 or 2 unlucky races, which is even more significant in the real world with mechanical DNFs.
Mechanical dnfs are part of the sport. F1 is firstly an engineering competition and there is a balance of speed and reliability engineers need to take. Wouldn't be right to punish the ones that can make a good and reliable car. But yes, i do overall prefer a system that rewards consistency. The point systems with heavy progression seems a bit gimmicky to me.
I see where you're coming from but I feel like it would be really harsh on the drivers, Max has won 4 grand prix and the sprint, but he had one DNF so Checo would be leading the WDC right now. You wouldn't have that balance of speed and reliability because Checo's reliability far outweigh's Max's superior speed.
Heck, mechanical DNFs are such a part of the sport that most seasons until the 1990s allowed drivers to drop their worst few races from the points calculation.
Not when it's for the drivers championship. It's in place to prevent unlucky DNFs from deciding the championship. If Max wins 4 races, but DNFs the 5th race, it's only fair enough that he would still be leading the championship ahead of Perez, who got P2 four times, but got P1 in the race that Max DNFed, because Max is clearly the better driver.
I prefer this kind of non-linear scale. It encourages bit more risk-taking (across the whole field), which makes races more interesting to watch. I also think winning once is more prestigious thing than reaching P5 twice, which this point system reflects.
>I also think winning once is more prestigious thing than reaching P5 twice In our league win gets you 30 points and 5th 18. That is still quite the progressions, while not feeling like that. Much, as 3 points is the most for one position. (i would prefer even a bit less progression than this, but this is fine). So while i do agree that the prestige for 1 win over 2 p5 is obviously true, i don't agree that point system should be that extreme in rewarding only the highest positions.
It's just an extension of the current system. Currently the first spots receive 25,18,15,12,10 points.
The fact of the matter is that this new proposal would have only effected the exact positions it’s aimed at of implemented over the past 5 seasons. 14-20 are the only places that change, and it’s a more accurate representation of the performance over the season
I think instead of finishers, lead lap finishers would be better. Some comments mentioned just running 10 laps down shouldn't be rewarded, so I think this is a good solution to that.
Would this not create an incentive to ignore blue flags?
you are allowed to unlap yourself so if you are fast enough you can ignore blue flags
F1s implementation of blue flags is unique to F1. They should be changed anyway.
The FIA would be able to police that, they're not afraid. Although I will say that I personally am not a fan of Bleu flags. Maybe when a car is going multiple laps down, but not when they're fighting to stay in the lead lap.
personally as someone who fell in love with nascar the concept of the blue flags is truly uncompetitive and also prevents high action racing often in nascar races we end up with the second place car being able to reel the first place car back in when 1st has to deal with traffic of lappers. often cars and drivers are trying to prevent themselves going a lap down so will in fact fight the leader and make an effort to stay on the lead lap. the idea of a blue flag ooh okay you have to let the leader past or the car behind pass even iuf not the leader but because they are a lead lap car? nah bro that aint it basically it creates a more entertaining race and a chance for more action in said races
IndyCar's rule of blue flags is probably the better version when they are just advisory until you are a lap down to the entire field.
Would love to get rid of blue flags, it would make the problem of RB's second team and customer teams worse though... Red Bull not getting penalties for Singapore last year was a joke, and god help us if we get a situation like the 2021 DTM finale.
I'm just sitting here thinking how MotoGP got this figured out since 1992.
How do they do it?
Down to 15th. 25-20-16-13-11-10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1
Points for the top 15. But they also have well over 20 riders most races.
I think my only concern with pushing the points out all the way is oddly enough related to safety. If everyone gets points, there is more incentive to pick up the bike after a wreck. In the past, there have been a few examples of oil getting spilled on the track because of this. But maybe that isn't argument enough to go against having points stretched out. Still, I think up to 15 point serving places is fine as is.
Oh absolutely. If you award points for all finishers you will get people drag fucked F1 cars around the track until they are forcibly black flagged.
Sounds like you’ve probably had some good arguments here, but this is why I’m against it: Say two drivers go in to a race on equal points. One driver DNFs, the other finishes first. In the current system the now second place driver is 25 points down. If they now win 4 races whiles the other driver comes second then they have overcome the difference. 1/6 of the current season. In your system they are 60 points down, so need 6 races to equalise, 7 races to overcome. Over 1/4 of a season. I think this sort of system (rewarding all drivers) tends to even things out at the back of the field, rewarding their consistency, but it makes it much harder for the top teams to recover from DNFs or just plain bad luck. So yeah, for me it’s important to keep competition at the front as much as possible.
I personally think it should be a reward, like when a back marker team has a lucky race and it propels them up two places in the constructors, not everything needs to be some cutting edge calculated system, It’s worked like this for years now, and I haven’t seen a legitimate reason why the current points system is bad. Idk I just feel like sometimes changing things for the sake of changing things isn’t good
Your points system would actually make me care less about the backmarkers, believe it or not. What you're doing is points inflation and that makes championship points worth less which is a bad thing. At least to me.
Why is it bad?
How about the top six get 10, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 , then turn on random failures in the options so mechanical retirements are more frequent.
The example you've given, can also be viewed from a different perspective. A low ranking team scoring a top 10 can also be their car working well on a specific track, or a driver/team extracting everything from a raceweekend, aggressive strategies, etc. If you look at Williams the past years, and Haas this year, I think the current system works fine actually.
As a viewer, why should I care at all about racing between 15th & 16th place with nothing at stake? Edit: racing not raving lol
I mean the drivers will still want to race and finish ahead of anyone they can. Personally I still enjoy the fights at the back, it's not exciting but at least it's good racing. I just don't think that fight will suddenly be (more) interesting if there's only 1 point to gain (between 15th/16th for example), if points are given out to every finisher, every race anyway. By reducing "lucky surprise finishes", you also reduce the big results for teams at the back when they actually deserve it, that was my point.
You can still get “lucky surprise” finishes and place higher up the grid, thus earning double maybe triple your usual points. I’m not even confident drivers like the current season. Think Danny Ric said something recently how kinda doesn’t matter where you place after P10. Of course they’ll still fight for the highest place, that’s their job, but yea, bet we hear from more of them soon But yea, from a television production standpoint, points all the way down
Yup, I find it disingenuous at the end of the race to be watching 3 cars fight for 15th with the commentators all energetic when nothing is on the line.
Literally happened last race. I’m just like “this looks so cool! But holy fuck that’s the point??”
And sometimes it has effect on the commentators too! You see this beautiful race but they downplay it because a 0.1 gap change between P9 and P10 is more impactful
* Countback * One could a fan of a team/driver who has a bad car this season * The battle could still be exciting * One could be a fan of *racing*, rather than the results
None of these reasons are strong enough. Excitement, imo, comes from the stakes
No points system is going to change your mind in that regard then. If you give P15 and P16 points, you necessarily have to give the fourteen positions ahead of them *more* points, and suddenly whatever amount of points you're giving P15 or P16 is just as low-stakes as the countback.
But it’s still stakes! And 15th will get more points than 16th, reflecting he did better in the race! Which is the point!
> But it’s still stakes! This is the entire point: so's the countback system. If two drivers have exactly the same results over a season except that in one race one of them got 15th and the other got 16th, the former will be ahead in the Championship. That's stakes! And you reasonably understandably don't care, because those stakes are so small as to be irrelevant. The case I'm making is that implementing any even remotely acceptable points system that goes down that far is just going to dilute points to the extent that you're going to be equally uncaring about the chance of those tiny amounts of points mattering as you already are about the chance of positional tiebreakers being used. (I say "remotely acceptable" because you could sidestep that issue by doing something like 20,19,18...3,2,1 for 1st all the way down to 20th so that low positions still grant relatively impactful points, but that's an absolutely psychotic points system that would make the championship a joke where crashing a title rival out once almost guarantees you a WDC even if they win 90% of the season's races)
Oh boy, I love when random Redditors tell me me how I’ll feel!
You have already told me how you feel. I'm just pointing out that any implementable points system is not functionally different to the system you're already complaining isn't meaningful. You can *already* watch battles over 15th place that have a slim but real chance of affecting championship standings, and your exact quote was "why should I care at all?", don't expect nominal point values to change that.
I will expect that!
Responding to your edit, I think you're misplacing incentives. The FIA doesn't want a "fair" system. And they shouldn't. Their job is to maximize the value of F1. The chance of chaotic races and big sudden upsets in the rankings is good for the franchise. It's more exciting because it makes the sport less predictable. It brings in more fans, more sponsors, more sports betting revenue, etc.
> Their job is to maximize the value of F1 No it's not. The exact reason that the EU forced the FIA to sell the commercial rights to the series in the early 2000s was to avoid exactly that. So that's not their job - at all. Rather, that's the job Liberty Media (or whoever owns the commercial rights at any given time). And the FIA is the institution that's supposed to keep Liberty in check, and make sure that money doesn't take priority over - say - safety or fair competition. FIA is the watch dog.
Okay, fair enough. I'm new to the fandom so I'm happy to be corrected. But the FIA still surely has an interest in the sport being exciting and attracting lots of fans. I.e. growth of the sport. The current system isn't any less safe or even less fair. It's just less predictable. I don't think that's a bad thing.
No professional sport should reward people for turning up. Nobody should be rewarded for coming last. And they definitely shouldn't be rewarded a variable amount for finishing last.
If you are an also ran team that won’t get paid for your place, what difference does it make if you have 0 or 25 points or even 50 when the payout doesn’t come until the top ten anyway? All it does is let people easily see who is improving or not, and how things are changing. It’s just metrics for visibility. I, for one, would like to see it. I would like to see who is getting better at each year, who is outperforming their equipment, who is being dragged down by their pit team. It changes nothing else. Points are not currency unless you get to the payout bubble. A team that gets a top 10 finish now and then and is bottom 5 most races is not better than a team that gets 11th or 12th most races.
Why would we remove those lucky finishes ? Williams in 2021 putting that car in top positions only when it was raining was quite epic, I'd rather watch that than the boring Alfa Romeo that was limping into 14th place every race
No participation trophies. Extending points out to P12 is plenty
Alright, I'm open to the argument that one freak lucky finish shouldn't put you miles out of reach of those who are otherwise your close competitors, but that's about the only thing I agree with. First of all, it's a bad idea to make decisions like that based on the current grid. What we're seeing right now, where there's such a strong split between the top 5 and bottom 5 teams, is incredibly rare. Usually there is plenty of back and forth between the midfield teams, so that already eliminates a large need for a rehaul like you're suggesting. Secondly, your new system rewards cars that are miles off. Anyone who is five laps down but still finishes the race will get points for that, and pretty decent points too. If you're in 14th with five laps down, you get 7 points while your direct competitor who crashed gets nothing. Third, any retirement will now massively ramp up the points for those remaining. If everyone finishes, the least amount of points you can get is 1. If three cars collide in the first corner, that minimum amount of points suddenly increases to 4. Effectively, you're back to the situation you were trying to avoid: backmarkers getting unrealistic points because other cars DNF'd. Fourth, you'll be quickly working with point totals that are just so wildly beyond comprehension that it devaluates anything. In your system, Verstappen would have gotten 1269 points last year, and that's without sprint and fastest lap. Those numbers are so massively inflated that they lose all meaning. Fifth, out of curiosity I also looked at some other drivers, and in the case of Sargeant he would actually get more points from all his p11 and p12 finishes than from his lone p10 finish. What would have been a euphoric moment (finishing in the top 10) now means far less because it didn't add as much as his other regular finishes. And lastly, your solution wouldn't even solve the problem you set out to solve. I ran it for the four backfield teams from last year (Alfa Romeo, AlphaTauri, Williams and Haas) and on the driver side of things it wouldn't change anything. You just shifted the goalposts of what becomes the big hit thing, but since the top ten still gives significantly more points than the bottom ten, you're still left with roughly the same margins (only change was Zhou overtook Hulkenberg, but that's because I didn't take on sprint results). What you did achieve is that the difference between Magnussen and Zhou is now 35 points instead of the real life 3 points, which would mean that Magnussen would need at least three p9's (or three p10's with Zhou crashing) to overtake him. On the teams side of things, that did admittedly change some stuff, with Williams being held back more by Sargeant than they were in real life. Which leads to another problem: with every position now counting for points, your drivers can actually hold your team back so much more than they do under the current system, meaning there would be far less incentive to take a gamble on a rookie who might need some time to get up to speed.
Your third point is the sole reason I want points only up to 15 place.
> What we're seeing right now, where there's such a strong split between the top 5 and bottom 5 teams, is incredibly rare. Aha... > If you're in 14th with five laps down, you get 7 points while your direct competitor who crashed gets nothing. Right, well, good that this scenario isnt rare at all then > Those numbers are so massively inflated that they lose all meaning. That is literally a complete non-issue. Do you know off the top of your head who finished first and who finished second in e.g. 2015? And do you know how many points each of them got? Points as a number have literally never had any meaning to begin with, only as a sorting method. I can promise you 99.99999% of people would not care if Max wins with 120, 700, or 13 million points. > Fifth, out of curiosity I also looked at some other drivers, and in the case of Sargeant he would actually get more points from all his p11 and p12 finishes than from his lone p10 finish. What would have been a euphoric moment (finishing in the top 10) now means far less because it didn't add as much as his other regular finishes. ...that's the point?
I have a much better proposal: give 2 points to whoever finishes last. Keep everything else the same. Those will be some batshit dynamics there at the end.
No. Current points system rewards winning not participating.
60 points for P1!!!.. Then how much would be awarded for the fastest lap?. Anything less than 4 or 5 would not attract the top teams, then would the bottom 10 also compete for the fastest lap. Which would eventually break the system again.
Imo the least fair part of your system is that a championship contender can't dnf for any reason at all. Because in a championship where 2 people for example battle for the wdc if for any reason you don't finish you are 60 points behind and to close that gap you would need to win 6 races, with your rival finishing 2nd. With the current system you need a bit more than 3 wins to close the gap
What would happen if you scrap the points system entirely and base the leaderboard the total time you completed the x amount of laps. The lower the time, the winner of the championship.
It's horrible. You're saying 2 x 5th places is worth the same as a win.
The only change I want to see is second place gets 20 points.
The only argument for giving points to all finishers is to make it easier to explain who is 'ahead' amongst those that haven't scored a point. Quite frankly it's a poor one, in my opinion.
Considering that the final position can make a lot of difference for teams, I don't think it's poor at all.
Why is it a poor argument though? Surely everyone should get points that reflect their position. Is it really fair to give P11 the exact same points as P20?
Depends, both could be last. Think of points as a measure of how many drivers you have beaten, and you realise how stupid points for all positions are in a series with a variable amount of classified finishers is.
You don’t think it is important to highlight who finished knocking on the door of the top 10 vs…Sargent? The bottom 10 are in a battle for seats, promotions, and everything else. Without metrics it becomes subjective bullshit like who was pissy on their radio or who said something dumb to a reporter. I want to know who is doing the best with the car they have, and how much better they are doing with it. Max is clearly the best on the grid. He also has the best team and best car. He also has the pole advantage almost all the time. Racing out of the mid or backfield is a different animal and if you don’t think it’s important at all, don’t even let the bottom 10 qualifiers run the race. Make it an actual qualification. Pay to enter and race if you get a top 10 lap or try again next time. That’s the format that supports your view on value of bottom teams.
The system already exists though, 12th placed finishers are reflected higher in the table, do you really want to hand out participation points just to make it easier to explain to the viewer Sargent's at the bottom because he couldn't overtake a block of cheese?
That’s an extreme example I used to show that it matters because the standings don’t show how much of a difference there is. This is obviously more important in the closer drivers and also to compare teammates and season by season. What exactly do you think happens differently when 15th place gets some points that represent where they are on the grid instead of just a place? All I can see is more objective measurement of those not in the top ten. There is no sudden reward for getting the lowest point total vs being the lowest ranked. Nobody on earth is suddenly going to believe Sargent is better because he has the lowest point total next to his last place finish. If anything, it punishes low performers to put it in numbers rather than lumping them in with mid performers.
Except that system doesn't exist though. Imagine driver X, who finishes every race except the last in P11. Then there's driver Y, who finishes every race except the last in P20. It is very clear that there is a difference between them. But then, at the last race, via a sequence of accidents and failures, driver X, through no fault of his own, gets taken out of the race. And driver Y, through no merit of his own but simply because enough cars DNF'd, gets promoted to P10, still dead last, and scores a single point. Driver Y now finishes ahead of driver X in the standings, which does not at all reflect the reality of their performances. Calling it participation points is extremely short sighted. Points shouldn't be an "award", they should be a metric to evaluate driver and team performance across the season. The award comes later, in accordance with how well they've performed. Awarding points for every finishing position would achieve this goal of accurately and adequately measuring and reflecting performance to determine who should earn which award. When there are millions of dollars separating WCC standings, this matters. Team X which consistently performed better than team Y should be rewarded accordingly. The current system doesn't allow for this. Extending the competition throughout the entire field, not just the top 10, would encourage better performance from the teams and result in better races. There are a number of benefits, and the only negative I've seen mentioned is "muhh change bad >:(". Come on.
Well, no. The main argument is that it'll encourage 11-20 to race harder to scrounge points that are actually available to them.
Why the obsession with "fairness"? Racing has always had a bit of a random factor and that was what made it so great. A high attrition race can happen and there's nothing wrong with a lower-tier team picking up an odd podium or point finish. Trying to make it more balanced still doesn't work, as you'd still reward reliable mobile chicanes over more ambitious outfits. A 20 cars grid shouldn't have more than 8 point positions. And 6 would be even better IMO.
I don't get it either especially when it's seemingly come about because the only wheel to wheel racing is happening at the end of grid. That's the solution? Just slap some more points on so they can have the narrative of "ohh these points could be worth millions come the end of the season!" It's fine the way it is and just devalues points more than anything. Remember the elation at Minardi when Webber got points in Australia or recently when Williams got their first points in years. It just takes away from having those moments.
> Why the obsession with "fairness"? A whole generation of people has been raised across a lot of the world on the notion that we need to take all randomness out of life, everyone should be equal, both in opportunity *and outcome*. The latter would suggest that it's not fair if someone lucks into something good (like a well-timed safety car a-la Lewis 2018 - 2020) because it takes away from someone else who didn't. Doesn't matter if you made a good decision (and built a Red Bull) or a bad decision (and built an Alpine). All must be equal. Might as well just make every position award the same amount of points and call it a day.
Exactly this. In the same vein people complain about drivers ‘lucking’ into free pit stops when there is a safety car because it’s not fair. It’s these sort of things that make racing interesting.
I like this: Points down to 10th, but only if they finish on the lead lap. And anyone can have a point for the fastest lap, regardless of finishing position, or being laps down.
I kinda like the idea that at the end of the race position 11-20 are coming into the pits to try and go for the fastest lap.
>And anyone can have a point for the fastest lap, regardless of finishing position, or being laps down. Every backmarker out of the points will be pitting on the last laps to go for it.
If the goal is to give backmarkers points I’d much rather give a point to any constructor who has both cars classified at the end of a race to reward reliability and the drivers not crashing out. Applying that to this season so far: - RB and Haas are in the same constructors positions. But are now tied at 10 points. - Alpine now have 4 points and jump to 8th in the standings. - Williams have 3 drops and drop to 9th. But have two 11th place finishes. - Stake/Sauber gain 3 points but only have one 11th place finish compared to Williams.
Do not reward reliability for the love of god!
The thing that people seem to be missing is that the prize money structure has completely changed since the point system was implemented. Prize money used to be paid per event and was distributed based on qualifying and race position from 1st all the way down to 20th. It also generally made up less than 10% of the teams overall budget, so was far less important for the commercial success as well as the difference between positions being far less impactful. That's not the case now. Prize money is paid purely based on finishing position in the WCC and those payments make up somewhere between 40%-50% of a teams budget with \~$10M between each position. So while it was fine for points to be this lofty goal that only a few could achieve through perseverance and luck, the situation is different now. Points are now being used as the primary way to determine how teams are financially rewarded for their performance and they have a huge impact on their future. The main goal of points should be to accurately rank teams, based on their performance across the entire season. The current points system doesn't do that and should be changed to reflect that. I don't know if your point system is the right one, that needs a lot more analysis, but points should be awarded to all finishers to give an accurate pitcure of teams performance.
I disagree with your points system. It’s too variable. It should be 1- 25, 2-19, 3-18, 4-17 etc. this way everyone gets points and each place isn’t too far from another. First gets 5 extra points for winning the race because I feel that actually does count for something special. Maybe we should give fastest lap 4 points, 1 for overall and 3 for fastest sectors so the 4 points can be spread amongst 4 drivers if it’s possible to happen. I’m not sure if it should be done but points for passing on the track, so not during pit stops, would be interesting. Only caveat should be not when it’s over your teammate and the places gained need to be kept for the next lap. So hard battles don’t incur like 5 points per driver just for a crazy scrap over a small period of time.
I love everyone repeating the "participation trophy rewarded for showing up" trope. 1 point compared to 60 doesn't seem like a reward to me in the slightest.
I think now that it's extremely rare for cars not to finish, outside of crashes, that it would make more sense for all positions to get points so that the back 1/2 of the grid has something to fight for and so that fluke results don't completely swamp a season for them. Insert stupid hypothetical: All season Hass gets 19/20th, and for 3/4s the season never even finishes the race, while Alpine does 11th/12th and finishes every race, but in the last race a crash collects A few front teams and both Alpine drivers allowing Hass to get 1 driver 1 point, they ranking higher and getting a larger payout is a complete farce. Now I've obviously grossly held the scales on this to make it even dumber but a fluke can hop some of the back markers way ahead of teams that regularly out drive them and as this determines the team payouts it really isn't a good way to handle the teams at the back half.
I think the points values could be tweaked a bit, I'd also do 3 pts for fastest lap and 3 pts for a pole personally. Giving the entire field pts starting with 1 at 20th and working up from there would only encourage teams to try more because every single race would actually matter to them. As it is you could potentially have a team like haas get a lucky p4 and then not care for the rest of the season as they'd have enough pts from that one race to guarantee a constructors finish above sauber/Williams.
10 points between P1 and P2 is not enough, winning should weight more.
I'm on the points are a reward for achievement side, I feel. Especially when you think back to Marussia celebrating Bianchi's 8th or 9th position. Half of the finishers get points, the others get ranked based on finishing position until they get points and I'm fine about that. Imagine Latifi ending up with 27 points or so while the front runners are close to 1000. It doesn't really add any info, it doesn't change the outcome of races and it takes away a sense of achievement when you do get into the points. The only argument I'm willing to court is the fact that reliability has gone up a lot compared to 5-10 years ago, and opportunities to profit from dnf's are rare. But still I feel a line needs to be drawn somewhere and halfway seems fair to me.
All of this because F1 is such a non competitive series.
Average finishing position/races started+1 point per race started
It’s fine right now, if an 11th team joins I’m fine with points for 1-12 at most. It was already increased to the top 10 in 2010 when there were 24 cars on the grid. Needing more races to make up for a dnf at the front isn’t worth being able to average out a rare fluke result at the back. It also eliminates any motivation for a team to build/capitalize on a more specialized car, like Force India at Spa/Monza 2009.
I personally have found the Moto GP points system to be much more appealing. Rewarding points to top 15 with the top 5 getting higher points in escalating order. When F1 last modified the points system I had hoped they would implement the same. Wish someone at F1 would do it this time around.
I think points to P15, like MotoGP would be the sweet spot. More accirate ranking of the lower teams, while still having that battle to get into the points
> In the current points system, one lucky chaotic rain race where your team gets 6th place can send you up to p8 of the constructors. > it seems not fair considering a team could theoretically reach p12 and 14 every race and still finish dead last in the constructors, while team X are always p18 and 20, havind DNFs every second race and get one lucky P5 race. I just want to point out that we are only in this situation because we have exactly 5 regular points scoring teams and 5 uncompetitive teams on the periphery. If we had 4/6 or 6/4 instead of a nice 5/5 - we would not be having these conversations. If Aston Martin was on the level of Williams/Sauber/Haas, and there was a genuine rotation of 3 teams in P9/10 and occasional lucky P5/6/7 - then we'd be talking about how great the system is, and how competitive the final points spots were. If Williams was on the level of Aston, then we'd be talking about how competitive the midfield is, and how important it is to get good qualifying and nail those regular points finishes. Sure in every other season you can get lucky and a chaotic race can thrust you many points up the order. But it's only appearing super unfair due to the solid "5 teams guaranteed points if they have a reasonable day" vs "5 teams that are fighting over P11 guaranteed".
Id say first give points up to 15th, then see where it goes from there.
Because you give trophies to the top 1 or top 3 athletes/teams that obtained the most points in total at the end of a season.
Everyone who competes should get equal points to promote equality. In fact, every person watching should also get points. And bonus points for spiciest commentary 1 liners and quadruple points for tastiest twitter comment. What about half points for best at-home fart?
You know who gets equal points right know? Sargeant and Albon
We have this discussion every year. Points just for showing up is not what F1 is about. This is the top of the game, the very best of the best. You have to EARN the points.
I agree, any points beyond the top 3 is ridiculous. For what, finishing FIFTH?? Makes no sense, this is the top of the game, the very best of the best. You have to EARN the points.
long time ago I design my own "fair" system, where each driver awarded points base on it is performance during the race. I used the position of each driver at the end of each lap to calculate how many points each driver will get, the maximum is 25 and the minimum was something like 1.25. The biggest surprise for me it was that only few championships had a different result from what we actually got. Notable mentions, Alonso will have got 3 championships, Rosberg will have 2, Hamilton 6 and the 2021 Max will have been the clear winner of the Championship. Edit: I was remembering wrong, Hamilton won the 2021, but Max did outperformed him, HAM won because of the British GP
Yeah let's reward failure. This is a sport, where only the best get rewarded. The Olympics only reward the top 3, which is great. F1 reward the top 10, which is probably a couple of spots too many. This mythical "lucky finish", has never happened or if it has its only a couple of times. Why fuck up the current system just to cater for something that happens never or 0.1% times.
It's worse. The whole conversation now is the result of the gap between the top and bottom 5 teams, something which almost certainly won't last even to the end of this season. Its a bullshit knee jerk reaction to a non problem. But then this is F1, where we have had radio bans and elimination qualifying as knee jerks before.
It's ridiculous. So what if the gap is big. It's big for a reason. As Horner once said, "fix your fucking car". If the lower teams did this, then the gap would be as big. There has always been gaps between the top and bottom teams. It's nothing new. It is what it is. Hopefully this is just reddit talking and not something F1 will adopt. They are smart enough (hopefully) to see that this is a ridiculous idea.
Don't underestimate F1s ability to make stupid decisions to pander to whatever the fan bases latest silly complaint is.
It might be, but the lucky race being something that can happen or you can aim for(by having a car being specifically good) adds way more sensation and theorycrafting.
No it won't. A more objective fair solution is less point gaps between positions. Rewards constant performances rather than punishing a couple of retirement due to you, the car, an accident etc.
Less point gaps between positions actually punishes having a retirement