F1 Fanatic

I prefer things exactly how they are, it is at least fairly simple.

But as a thought exercise, this is really cool :D

@maksutov, I think the trouble with going down that route is, it will start to be pretty arbitrary what is awarded and what isn’t.

That does not count for qualifying, off course. But with Qualifying the reward is/should be giving you a better position for the race, not gaining points. If we want to reward excellent qualifying results, we could always instate a price for qualifyer of the year or something. Or even give bonus money for pole or for making Q2 and Q3.

Thanks @alex for putting up this post to carry the discussion onwards. A very intresting effort with the logarithmic system. I think you are right in higlighting how the first thing to get it right-ish is the question of what to reward in what proportions.

@jajo, the current system seems to have started out with a more or less logical range of points. But it was then “corrected” to give a bigger difference between 1st and 2nd (suddenly making it only a small difference between 2nd and 3rd, to small imo) and the points between 5th and 10 are a bit dodgy as well.

When I think about it @alex, I think it should be pretty clear that winning the race is more than getting on the podium regularly. And getting 2nd should be substantially better than 3rd. But all of those are certainly rated higher than getting in a good points paying position in 4t-6th etc.

I think winning a race coud be as much as 2 x 2nd or 3 x 3rd then to reflect its special to end up there. Then it should be a big difference to finish in the top 10 or not, although its debatable weather finishing say 8th is much better than say getting into 10th or 11th repeatedly, but I think there should be a pretty big bonus for freak results like these.
It does stick in our minds if a guy like Buemi suddenly finishes in the top 6 or something early in his career, far more then if he gets 2-3 times 10-12th. And it does show a driver like that can make things work for himselve.

One thing that would make it far more complicated is, if you take in account not just finishing in a position repeatedly but consecutively (i.e. giving more points for a hattrick of wins in a row then for 3 wins during a season) to reflect how hard it is. But during a season the likelyness of finishing more races in 1st should statistically be taken per race (my opinion), as each race is an individual event.
Indeed, one could say something for even giving LESS reward for more wins, once a driver/team gets more of them, as the likelyness of it is higher due to this driver/his car being better! (this would reflect the deminishing returns in fans view of a driver when winning more and more, each win adds less to how he is rated after the first couple of wins it just gets a statistic)
This way we should reward say a HRT driver getting into 6-10 th almost as much as a Williams driver winning and both should get more than Alonso, Button, Hamilton or Vettel winning it several times in their current cars!
That last one is not really to rate teams/cars in this case though. Its more going towards a system for rating individual drivers (didn’t we discuss one of those a couple of months ago)

I’m with a lot of people in thinking the points scoring system used now is pretty good. But I really enjoyed reading that and found it incredibly interesting to compare the lower half of the grid more accurately. I was surprised to see d’Ambrosio ahead of Senna and Glock, however!

Thanks for that updated table @alex!

Interesting to see how the fiirst half of the field pretty much fits with my impression. Vettel (+RB7) clearly up front, then a relatively tight group of 4 and Massa, Rosberg, Schu … up to Di Resta close together in the midfield with all having some supprisingly good races, being pretty consitent and sometimes a fluke. Heidfeld might have been in there as well, if he had been able to do a full season.

Then we have the group of drivers around 30 points. Behind that it really does get a bit murky with Jerome finishing better than Heikki, Jarno and Timo. Sure enough he did a solid job in a bad car, maybe we have all underestimated him then? Or it shows we are getting closer, but not there yet.

Obviously the drivers not doing all of the season would have a horrible job getting anywhere near a good position here. To evaluate how good they were, one would have to take it in relation to the amount of races they could participate in.

@bascb

“But with Qualifying the reward is/should be giving you a better position for the race, not gaining points.”

Of course these would be radical changes that may never be implemented but I still think it would work. The weight dependency of the points can still be split. For example, if a car fails or some trivial electronic mishap occurs during a race, all qualifying efforts go to waste. Rather than having qualifying “only” give you a better start position (which is a rather obvious component) why not split the overall total points to say 20% / 80%. Where 20% awarded for qualifying positions, 80% for race (or even 10%/90% would be sufficient). This would force drivers to do their best during both qualifying and race.

It would certainly prevent drivers from purposely not setting a time or saving tyres or whathaveyou .. I still think qualifying points should be implemented despite of the initial award intended only for the starting position.

I don’t like the idea of points for qualifying or fastest laps, because they can be used to gain points not deserved because you could set a car up to just do that.
Also as this season has shown if a driver only needs one point to secure the title the temptation would be use one or both of these methods without caring what their race position was.

On the subject of giving points all the way down to last place, what happens to the points when there is a multi-car pile up in turn one or two. e.g. USA 2006, seven cars out at turns 1 & 2, +1 for damage sustained in that incident, retired lap 3.

On the points scoring system, mathematically to Keep It Simple, why not try a Fibanaci series. Where the points for the higher position equals the points awarded to the next two lower positions. From the last points position that would be 1, 2, 3, 5, 8……….
(if I missed some ‘a’s its the k/brd)