I'm going to keep pumping these out until either when I get something that I think reflects gains and losses due to unreliability/luck/errors or I get bored... this one I think works a bit better and is simpler. Sorry for high jacking the thread, I'm trying to find something that will help with the interpretation of the team mate comparisons...
I've seen other people do it before, but let me introduce the
position total championship! Instead of awarding points in the usual way, a driver's score at each race is his finishing position - 1st means one "point", 12th means twelve "points" etc. For retirements and all other reasons for not finishing a race (apart from not competing in it) I award 24pts. The driver with the lowest score at the end of the season wins.
This means a retirement is a
big penalty in this system, particularly for the front runners for which it will cost them 20pts or so (20 races worth of wins, rather than losing out on only one race worth of wins in the current system!) Consistency is king and it should be easy to spot the drivers who have had problems as a result.
The position total championship (PTC) would currently look like this (note that I have scaled Grosjean's total by a factor of 19/18 to account for his missed race):
So Raikkonen would be leading the way, but Alonso and Vettel would still be in contention! Vettel would need to beat him by 3 places and Alonso would need to beat him by 6 places to take the crown.
The gains/losses compared with the current WDC standings are this (I've given the 'new' team drivers fractions of points from 0.1 to 0.6 in the WDC just to get there ranking correct):
If we look at the bottom of this table you immediately see the drivers who have had a bit of an eventful season, the likes of Grosjean, Schumacher, Hamilton (who moves down from 4th to 7th in this system!) and Maldonado are all there. The Sauber drivers also have failed to finish on many occasions (in fact, they're even stevens in the PTC!). Maldonado ends up below slow but steady Senna and Kovalainen can almost see Schumacher's (about to break) gearbox. Hamilton loses of the order of 50-100pts compared to Alonso, Vettel and Raikkonen purely as a result of his extra, blameless, retirements (and would still be in contention for the championship as well if that hadn't been the case).
At the top, aside from Raikkonen the big gainers from consistent driving and the retirements of others are Ricciardo, di Resta and Senna. So, going back to the Toro Rosso debate, Ricciardo moves all the way up to 11th in this system whereas Vergne doesn't move. You'd have to figure out what's caused Vergne's issues, I can't remember, but Ricciardo has certainly been better at getting the car home - so good that he ends up not far from the front of the midfield. Di Resta ends up ahead of Hulkenberg in this system, and I can't remember Hulkenberg being to blame for any crashes which suggests that Nico deserves to be further ahead of Paul than he actually is, perhaps.
Frankly I could have saved a lot of time by just making a table of the number of retirements for each driver...
