Bernie Ecclestone nearly altered Formula 1’s scoring system for a ridiculous reason that would have turned the sport into the Olympics.
Call it a Thanksgiving Throwback Thursday. This week marked the 11-year anniversary of a radical idea set forth by Bernie Ecclestone for Formula 1 that actually received approval by the FIA to go into effect before drivers and teams fought it and ultimately (thankfully) got their way.
The 2008 Formula 1 season, which had ended roughly three weeks prior to Ecclestone’s proposition, was the sixth season in which the 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 scoring system was utilized. In this system, drivers who finished races in the top eight were awarded those respective point totals.
This system was put into place following 12 years of the 10-6-4-3-2-1 scoring system, where drivers who finished race in the top six were awarded those respective point totals and there was a lot heavier weight placed on actually winning.
The 2008 season provided one of the most down to the wire championship battles in Formula 1 history.
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Yet Ecclestone found the racing action to be “boring” and drivers to be too complacent with scoring decent points without winning to better their positions in the driver standings, and he literally proposed removing points from the Formula 1 World Championship.
And yes, the FIA literally approved the idea for the 2009 season.
His proposition? Whoever wins the most races wins the championship, and race winners would be awarded gold medals. Second place finishers would be awarded silver medals and third place finishers would be awarded bronze medals.
Should two or more drivers be awarded the same number of gold medals, silver medals would be the tiebreaker. If they were still tied, bronze medals would be the tiebreaker, and so on.
Teams and drivers were not buying the idea, however, and instead, a new 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 scoring system was introduced ahead of the 2010 season to put a bigger emphasis on winning.
This system is still in effect for a 10th consecutive season, although there was an additional point added for recording the fastest race lap ahead of the 2019 season, a point that had not been utilized since the 1959 season prior to this year.
Had Ecclestone’s idea been implemented, the results 11 Formula 1 World Championships from 2009 to 2019 would not have changed much, although the manner in which most of them were won would have been different. Several would have been sealed far earlier than they were — the literal definition of “boring”.
As for the slight changes, Sebastian Vettel would have beaten Fernando Alonso on fourth place tiebreaker in 2010 as opposed to on points, and Lewis Hamilton would have beaten Nico Rosberg in 2016, not the other way around.