Pieces of eight? Yes, all the way down to 12th place. Has Polly gone crackers? Perhaps. Our man asks if, in its quest to reach Treasure Island, Formula 1 has gone down a rabbit hole instead…
I’M GUESSING THAT LIBERTY MEDIA must have formed a ‘Formula 1 Book Club’. It makes sense. With a massive F1 calendar and so many flights between races, the book club has been established to help team principals while away the hours between bouts of business interrupted by sending their cars on track to run in a DRS train for 90 minutes every other Sunday. Alice in Wonderland appears to be required reading, along with Treasure Island and Where’s Wally (a special F1 edition for the US market in which Wally, when found, is obliterated and not allowed to join in).
It seems to me that someone in authority must have been reading Lewis Carroll’s celebrated story of Alice, who falls through a rabbit hole and enters a fantasy world. This F1 influencer has clearly been enthused by the plot, particularly the bit where one of the characters (appropriately named ‘Dodo’) suggested a race. When the Dodo suddenly declared the race to be over, the participants naturally wished to know who had won. Initially flummoxed by such a reasonable question, the Dodo magnanimously declared: “Everybody has won – and all must have prizes!”
And there you have it. The F1 Sporting Regulations will need to be read in conjunction with Alice in Wonderland now that some F1 Dodo has decided to award points to 12th place – and possibly beyond. Who knows where this might end? A championship point for simply turning up (with TWO cars, of course)? A bonus point for putting forward the most vacuous ‘Celebrity’ for interview on the grid? How about the mechanic with the best tattoo on their left forearm? Or the driver who says most often: “Dunno. Should be a good race. Let’s see what happens” when questioned while on their way to the grid. Certainly, if the F1 Dodo succeeds, it will no longer be worth a driver or team principal wishfully saying: “We hope to score a point.” That will become as easy having your loyalty card stamped at Costa on a Sunday afternoon.
The distribution of points has had various iterations since the inception of the F1 world championship in 1950. For the first ten years, the top five finishers received points on the sli
