KEY POINTS:
Bernie Ecclestone, Formula One's commercial tsar, claimed yesterday that the 2009 world championship will be decided solely on a driver's haul of gold medals - which will be awarded to race winners - rather than on points gleaned over a season.
Ironically, he revealed that it was Lewis Hamilton's success in winning the world title in Brazil earlier this month that crystallised his thinking on a new scoring system at grands prix.
Hamilton needed only to finish fifth in the season's final race, and McLaren adopted a strategy to achieve that rather than going for victory.
The current system was inaugurated in 2003 when, in a bid to stop a runaway Michael Schumacher, points were extended down to eighth place so that there could be a difference of only two points between the winner and the second-place man instead of, as previously, four.
Under this year's rules, the scoring ran 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 from first down to eighth.
Under the proposed new scheme, which Ecclestone said should be approved when the motorsport world governing body, the FIA, meets in Monaco next month, Felipe Massa would have won this year's title on the strength of six victories, or "gold medals" to Hamilton's five.
Ecclestone plans to scrap points altogether, and simply award gold, silver and bronze medals to the top-three finishers.
"It's going to happen," he said.
"All the teams are happy. The reason this happens is that I get fed up with people talking about no overtaking. It's just not on that someone can win the world championship without trying to win the race."
However, even the great Michael Schumacher, F1's "biggest winning" driver with 91 victories, settled for the eighth place he needed in the 2003 season-ending Japanese Grand Prix, thus beating Kimi Raikkonen by two points.
Several times a driver with fewer victories has also amassed sufficient points to beat a rival, who has won more races, to the title.
Mike Hawthorn became Britain's first world champion in 1958 when he beat Stirling Moss by a point; Moss won four races to Hawthorn's one, and even Moss's team-mate, Tony Brooks, won three.
In 1982 Keke Rosberg won the title on the basis of points accrued, even though he won only one race.
Ecclestone is not impressed by such arguments, and had short shrift for those who suggested that his proposed new system might unfairly see a driver who finished second in every race over the season and thus amassed a high score of points, beaten by a rival who lucked in to a single victory.
"You'll have to try harder next year," he said.
Ecclestone's proposal was ridiculed by former team owner Eddie Jordan, newly announced as a BBC F1 pundit for 2009.
Jordan told BBC Radio Five Live that he believes that removing the incentive for drivers in smaller teams to fight for points finishes will harm teams who do not have the type of resources to challenge the front-runners.
"I think it's nonsense," Jordan said. "The points are necessary. I was one of the team principals who advocated that points should go down to eighth place, because one point to a team down there is as important as a win is to the likes of McLaren and Ferrari.
"I can promise you, having been in that position, two points against no points is a huge difference."
He said that battling to get into the top eight for a midfield team was an important part of a driver's development.
"Drivers like Massa, who started at the very bottom and worked his way up, know how important those points are at the back of the field. Everybody that's involved in the financial side knows how important it is, and the extraordinary excitement that there is for getting a point at the back.
"McLaren and Ferrari are working on a budget of perhaps 250 million [pounds], and then you have other teams like Force India and Toro Rosso, who would have maybe 10 times less budget to play with, and inferior drivers because they're learning their trade, and they will come and be world champions in years to come.
"But they have to find their feet somewhere, and that place has to be in the smaller teams because they're the people who take the risks."
Jordan also doubted the universal support that Ecclestone claims his proposal has.
"He's tinkering with something that in my opinion he has lost the understanding of," he said.
"He thinks people are only interested in winning races. I'm sorry, but there's just not enough thought put into this. It should be put to one side and discussed by him and Max Mosley, and for Bernie Ecclestone to say it's coming with the full approval of all the teams, I simply don't believe it."
Ecclestone was in London announcing an agreement with LG Electronics, which will make the South Korean electronics company an official sponsor of F1 via branding during broadcast of the sport.
- THE INDEPENDENT
