Here’s Nico Rosberg’s trophy from coming third in the Malaysian Grand Prix over the Easter weekend, pretty isn’t it. As well as trophies for the top three drivers, they also receive points, in order of their finishing position. For 2010, the points scale was heavily revised with points for victory being a massive 25 rather than 10 and with all cars down to 10th place receiving points, rather than previously just the top eight.
Now, three races into the 2010 championship and here at Badger we’re all rather pleased to see that the top five drivers are covered by only four points – i.e. it’s all pretty even and no one is just running away with it, phew. The only slight hiccup is that 2008 runner up, Felipe Massa is topping the tables with 39 points, despite not winning a race or having any particular performance of note so far this year.
In the far-from-entertaining season opener in Bahrain, he followed Alonso home in 2nd place with no answer to the Spaniard’s speed, in Australia he came home in third place after holding up Alonso for most of the race and having no answer to Robert Kubica in 2nd place and then just now in Malaysia he was as quick as Alonso who had a problem with his car and looked slow relative to Hamilton who seemingly overtook every car in the field including those in the GP2 race earlier that day.
Nothing personal against Felipe, he’s a great chap and we’re so very pleased he came-back this season after the horrifying accident in Hungary last season, but to comeback and lead the championship after an less than inspiring performance so far seems a bit cheeky and questions whether this new system has made any difference whatsoever (granted we’d rather have this than the medals idea from Bernie)
The new points are supposed to be designed to encourage drivers to over-take and go for glory, sadly it seems to have made no difference so far and just causes a headache when comparing to previous seasons’ stats and results.
Those with a more short-sighted opinion could say the new system works really well because it’s kept them all close in the table, but that’s not quite true – as the graphic below shows, even on the old system it’s still close – and therefore it’s the different race results (and Vettel’s unreliable Red Bull) that has kept the championship even. As ever with F1, they change so many different rules that it’s tricky to see what’s worked and what hasn’t. For more on F1’s silly rule changes read “Breaking the formula – Rules are there to be… changed?”
What to do you think of the new points? Good, bad, indifferent?
