Alternative Championship Scoring....

I'm stuck in London overnight with nowhere to stay which means I'm hidden away in EasyEverything with time on my hands.....

So I thought I'd find the answer to something which had occurred to me on the train from Paris earlier in the day. I've always felt that F1 racing, and any kind of racing for that matter, is primarily about winning individual *races*, not collecting points. And that got me thinking, what the list of world champions look like if the championship were awarded to the driver who won the most races in any given season (using the points only to split drivers with an equal number of wins), rather than who had scored the most points

Anyway, here are the 'alternative' champions. In years not listed, the driver who won the most races and the driver who won the championship were one and the same

1958 - Stirling Moss
1964 - Jim Clark
1967 - Jim Clark
1977 - Mario Andretti
1979 - Alan Jones
1982- Didier Pironi
1983 - Alain Prost
1984 - Alain Prost
1986 - Nigel Mansell
1987 - Nigel Mansell
1989 - Ayrton Senna

Surprises me going through the list, to find just how rarely a driver other than the world champion scores the most wins in a season. Though it did seem to happen more often than not in the 1980s for soem reason. I would also note that the system doesn't always necessarily produce a more worthy champion. While I reckon Mansell probably did deserve the title more than Piquet in 1987, there can be no doubting that Prost was the best allrounder in 1986, and would doubtless have won many more races than anyone else had he had a car to compete with the Williams. Notably, under this system, Senna and Clark would have joined Prost among the quadruple world champions (Prost loses two titles he won under this scoring system, but also wins two titles he would have lost.) Andretti would have had back to back titles, and Stirling Moss would no longer be regarded as the best driver never to have won the world championship.

Ah well, only eight hours until the first morning train up to Scotland.

In the dim recesses of Time, there was a similar move afoot to award The Cup to the driver winning the most races that season and hang the rest of the nonsense. Naturally, the idea was doomed and smothered in its crib by the CSI....

Personally, I think this is pretty much how I view things. It certainly simplifies things.....

I think F1 comes closest, you get almost twice as many points as second place for winning. Contrast that to NASCAR where depending on the scenario 1st and 2nd can score the same points.

I want to watch racing, not math.