Mike Gascoyne wants to review the points system

By overtaking Charles Pic for the gain of eleventh place, during the final Grand Prix of the 2012 season, Vitaly Petrov allowed the Caterham team to seize tenth place in the constructors’ standings by a hair: It was a fantastic job by Vitaly, but it was deserved as the team was ahead of Marussia all season long: we were a better team than them. It would have been an anomaly if we hadn’t finished tenth just for that spot, says Mike Gascoyne to Sky Sports F1 Online.

The numbers indeed support the Briton, as in qualifying, a Caterham beat the Marussias 19 times, while on 17 occasions, it was the two Malaysian team’s drivers who outpaced their Marussia counterparts, which the latter only managed to do once, in the United States.

In races, with the exception of the Australian and Singapore Grand Prix, a Caterham driver always finished ahead of a Marussia driver. In every other race, both drivers from Tony Fernandes’ team would also outperform their counterparts from Marussia, a feat the latter only managed once, during the Australian Grand Prix, following the retirements of Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov.

For several seasons, Motorsinside.com has been establishing a consistency ranking in which all drivers receive points: 24 points for the first, 23 points for the second, 22 points for the third, and so on until the last, who, if classified, scores one point. In this consistency ranking, the hierarchy at the back of the grid is clearly established, with Caterham scoring 311 points, ahead of Marussia (249 points) and HRT (146 points).

However, the battle for the tenth place is not without interest, as only the top ten ranked teams are taken into account in the redistribution of the Formula 1 commercial rights. Thus, Mike Gascoyne estimates there were seven million reasons to fight for the tenth place, referring to the amount that this position is worth in British pounds. So many reasons, therefore, explaining the Briton’s desire that this place should not be decided by a single feat but rather reward consistency: I think we should consider awarding points to everyone because […] we outclassed them in every race and we could have lost a huge amount of money on a single race and it shouldn’t happen that way.

Formula 1, however, has never adopted a full-points system, with the current system being the one that rewards the most drivers in the history of the sport. A reform is not currently on the agenda, even if the introduction of a full-points system in Formula 1 would not be revolutionary in the world of motorsports, as some championships have long adopted such a system, like NASCAR. It remains to be seen whether Formula 1 is ready, considering that for over sixty years, scoring points has been a symbolic goal for any driver and/or team, even if today the system seems ill-suited to the context of a championship where commercial rights are redistributed based on the world championship standings and where, as 2012 showed us, everything can be decided in a single race.