The Right Formula, finally!

The change in the point system for this year's drivers championship has attracted a lot of debate. This year, the driver with most race wins will be crowned the champion with rest of the standings the same as before. This change, an absolute u-turn on the change made about half a decade back in the points system, makes sense for a lot of reasons.

The very nature of F1 is going to prevent it from ever being it top heavy. The constant change in technology constraints, the massive sums of money put in the off season resulting in the rapid rate of development is never going to give you more than two or three teams contending for the championship. This statement is true irrespective of the points system you chose to have for the drivers, the 10-6-4, or the 10-8-6, or the new one. It is because of this nature of competition for the top spot, that the new ruling makes sense. While the ruling on the face of it appears to favor heavily, brilliance to consistency, the motivation for such a ruling is easily seen.

The points system was changed from the 10-6-4, to the 10-8-6 format for two obvious reasons. One, was to obviously reward consistency. The other was, by giving greater number of teams a chance to fight for the final point and all the good stuff that comes with it, an incentive for teams to compete at the F1 level. While this looked good on paper, the light top, heavy bottom nature of competition in F1 makes consistency, in F1, overrated, from a driver's perspective. Just about any driver who makes it to the F1, given a Ferrari or a Mclaren, is good enough to finish in the top 4 seventy percent of the times (Rubens, David will testify to that). However, what the 10-8-6 system did was to penalize a contender heavily for a car failure, as it opened up the field for his rival to pocket at least 6-8 points without taking any risks. In the present scenario, even with the new rule, it is impossible to win the championship with say, 3 good races.

The alternative suggestion was to give greater importance to the winner of a race, by increasing the gap between 1 and 2. Like in the 2 wheeler competition. Suppose a 25-15-10 system. Although something this drastic has not been discussed (There was a proposal to increase the difference to 3 by the F1 teams Association). A look back to the 2003 season, will show why this system is not the best for F1. Kimi, was just 2 points away from winning the championship, despite winning just one race. The cars built on the edge, are much more suspect to failing, more often. Astonishingly enough, the two drivers of the team never seem to have the same luck. It has almost never happened that both the drivers had the same number of retirements due to car failures. In most cases, it is not even comparable.

This system keeps the drivers away from assuming the 1-2 role much later into the season. The change rewards the winner to the maximum, but the present nature of competition makes them get away with such ignorance to consistency. The new rule gives all the drivers sitting in capable machines a greater chance to win the championship and hence will promote a much more aggressive brand of racing. Also, this only has to improve even the slightest of chance the middle rung teams have, to produce a champion. And quite often, that is more than enough to put in more commitment to bridge the gap. Hence for the scenario as it is, the new system is the best thing to happen to F1.

And from the viewpoint of a fan, it will be the most aggressive brand of racing to witness this decade. Just wait for the five red lights to go off.