F1 Alternate Standings: NASCAR Style (Part II)

DISCLAIMER: Part I here features the explanation of the points system and several assumptions I've utilized to make the conversion possible. If you're a bit confused and don't want to be, that's where I'd look.

In the previous post I've made on this little fantasy league idea, I've mentioned that, if F1 were to adapt the Chase system, then the points conversion would kick in after Singapore. Well, here we are after Sebastian Vettel won the 2012 Singapore Grand Prix so let's dive right back into counting.

The three races after I've done the first "NASCAR Style" post have created quite a bit of confusion for the way in which I am to continue this. First and foremost, Romain Grosjean's race ban and the one-off appearance of Jerome d'Ambrosio created a little bit of pandemonium in the standings, as, if I were to count that race as a "0" for Grosjean, he'd be at a massive disadvantage compared to everyone else, since I haven't counted DNSs as 0 points before to allow for deeper analysis of the backmarker situation. In this case, I could've done it only if I were to go back and also award "0"s to Timo Glock and Vitaly Petrov, as both missed races, as well as Pedro de la Rosa and Narain Karthikeyan, who didn't make the start for the Australian Grand Prix due to failing to meet the requirements of the 107% rule. As such, I gave Grosjean 25th place for Monza with 19 points, which is a little silly, but in the end will have little impact on the standings.

The three rounds after the torturous August break have mixed up the standings quite nicely, as it seems. Alonso is still in the lead, but, with his retirement at Spa, his lead has decreased a bit. Raikkonen went from 4th to 2nd with a string of consistent points finishes (which, as we've seen, is the most important thing for these standings). Vettel stayed in 3rd, while Webber lost a fair amount of ground. Due to the 2 DNFs, Hamilton dropped below Rosberg even, although F1 fans will attest to the fact that Lewis has done an excellent job for the three races.

In the back, Grosjean lost a lot of ground due to what essentially was 2 DNFs, while Ricciardo has noticeably moved up. In the back, everything remained virtually in place as de la Rosa finally began to build up a gap to Karthikeyan.

Funnily enough, all the people originally set to make the Chase are the ones who would end up making it in the end - Hulkenberg, despite having two unfortunate races, easily remained in 11th to grab the Wild Card spot based on most points, while Maldonado's position was never really in danger due to his race win. As such, Schumacher and Grosjean would be the most noteable drivers to miss the Chase with their inconsistency and Mercedes reliability issues at fault. Kamui Kobayashi would also be another major driver missing out in a fitting development of his less-than-fortunate season.

With the points reset for the Chase, Alonso would keep the lead due to the bonus points for his three wins, but Hamilton would be equal on points with him, only losing out due to having no second places. Button, Vettel and Webber would be contesting third due to having two wins, while Rosberg would be firmly in sixth due to his one win.
Maldonado, being a Wild Card, would not be eligible for any points for his win, but it would still put him ahead of everyone else in the standings, with the latter half of the Chase drivers at 2000 points.

For predictions, you'd be really hard-pressed to call this one, as it looks like the points lead would just go to whoever out of the top 6 would have less retirements. Alonso's win in this one doesn't look that likely, but if Ferrari have excelled at one thing so far, it has been reliability, so he might still have this in the end. Raikkonen is also a decent bet despite being eighth due to a lack of wins, since he has been very consistent with his finishes and has generally managed to avoid any trouble.

With all that wrapped up, we have a six race Chase ahead of us and it might just be harder to call this little fantasy experience than it is to call the actual thing. The next update in this is planned after the Indian Grand Prix, which will mark the halfway point of the Chase. Stay tuned.

The Young Driver Test Situation

I am no specialist when it comes to the different feeder series and other junior racing categories in the pre-F1 ladder, but even a casual onlooker could tell you there's a lot of things wrong with the way F1 teams handle the Young Driver Test in 2012. As I'm writing this, the second part of the hopefully only-three part festivity recently took place at Magny-Cours where Mercedes, Force India and Ferrari were supposed to give some car time to their hot prospects but instead were doing who-knows-what. Without further ado, let's cut to the chase - this thing is wrong and I can tell you why it's wrong and why somebody should probably fix it.

The Lineup

It is to my and, I believe, every other spectator's understanding that the Young Driver Test is supposed to show off the best upcoming talents to F1 teams so that they could later hire the driver into their programme, for a test role or even as one of their two drivers in F1. The punchline is, though, that the reality does not reflect on that little dream world of ours at all, with F1 teams either using the test opportunity to give the car to moneybags who have no business in F1 or to give some more time to the main driver of their programme. Both of those things shouldn't be happening yet it's this year that they've reached an absolute high point. Out of the six teams that have run (or are running) the Young Driver Test by now, I can point to one team and one team only that isn't completely wasting it. 

Williams - despite the fact that they're kind of sort of supposed to run the F2 champion during the YDT, the team decided to go ahead with the mid-season test at Silverstone and ran Valtteri Bottas during both days. Bottas is unquestionably talented and it's great that Williams are giving him an opportunity... that totally isn't like the other 15 opportunities they will give him this season as that's the number of FP1 sessions he's supposed to complete in 2012.

HRT - the Silverstone test might've ran for two days, but HRT figured they didn't need that much, instead of opting to run on Thursday only. Who did they run? Ma Qing Ha, who would later go on to become the first Chinese driver in a official timed F1 session and whose single-seater record suggests he's about as deserving on F1 seat as I am. 

Marussia - the only team with a semblance of sense and decency when it came to that question ran Max Chilton and Rio Haryanto. Both men are talented, have been impressive in GP2 this year (Chilton in particular) and run for Marussia's squad in that series. Good job.

Force India - the team ran Jules Bianchi, Luiz Razia and Rodolfo Gonzalez in the YDT. I can't question the involvement of Razia, as his GP2 campaign has been stellar so far. But Bianchi and Gonzalez just shouldn't be there - one because he already does a ton of FP sessions for the team and has run in YDTs before and the other because his 10 points in 4 seasons of GP2 don't exactly make him worthy of that. And I'm pretty sure he's already a Caterham tester. Just what in the hell, guys.

Mercedes - the German factory squad ran their usual test driver Sam Bird but also decided to give Brendon Hartley a shot because they felt real generous. Bird is long overdue an F1 seat, but he has previous F1 car experience and has no business in a test like this. Hartley, meanwhile, has raced all of four GP2 races this year, instead mostly focusing on prototypes... and also has previous F1 car experience. 

Ferrari - the Italian team ran Davide Rigon and... Jules Bianchi. Again. Rigon has been listed as a Ferrari test driver for a while but this is his first proper shot at driving the car, so that's kinda okay, except for the fact that the guy hasn't done single-seaters since 2011 and has been mostly doing endurance racing. 

The Dates

Previously, the YDT took place right when it should - i.e. at the end of a season with F1 almost over and most of the junior series wrapped up. It made lots of sense, too - F1 would be looking for people to hire for next year with teams having all the results of this year available so that they can make a reasoned choice. Plus, a YDT test would be used as a reward, like for Robert Wickens and Mirko Bortolotti last year (both winners of a junior series that got a day of testing for their success).

Well, it's now looking like that's a thing of the past, since the F1 season isn't exactly over and neither are the junior categories yet we've already had 6 out of 12 F1 teams run their YDTs. This honestly does a great deal to undermine the initial point of the whole event as F1 teams, very clearly instead of looking at what goes on in the world of junior series racing, just lend the YDT opportunity to the biggest bidder or run their usual test driver. They don't care about who achieves what down the ladder and they're making it pretty damn obvious.

The most irritating thing, however, is the impact this has on the "series win" reward idea that generally was pretty good for drivers who lacked funds in the past. Last year the reward for winning the Formula 2 title was testing the Williams at the YDT - but I'm not quite sure how that can continue this year, seeing how Williams already did their tests and the Formula 2 season isn't even over. You still have to see what comes out of this, but it's upsetting at best.

The Testing

Here's another reason why running the YDT midseason should just be outright forbidden - because teams use it as a testing opportunity and pretty much every team lacks those in F1. It makes sense, I can't blame them for it, but it gets ridiculous when the main thing discussed about the Mercedes YDT is the upgrades they're gonna test, not the actual "young driver" they're running. Again, there's clear shoddy organization and a conflict of interests here, but doesn't mean it's not seemingly really easy to fix.

The season so far in junior single-seater categories has gotten us to notice some very talented guys who most of us would probably like to get a shot at F1. The names of James Calado and Felipe Nasr popped up in GP2 with both of them mounting great rookie campaigns and putting up more than a fight against the regulars. The four people in contention for the GP3 title produced a wonderful show with some really mature and cool-headed racing. Robin Frijns has been setting the world alight in WSR, regularly beating Bianchi and Bird and, at the moment of writing, being the clear title favorite. Yet, with 6 teams out of 12 having gotten their YDT out of the way, none of them seemingly got an invite. And THAT is pretty shameful for the sport and an indication that something isn't quite working right at the moment. It's up to the FIA to figure out what that is.

F1 Alternate Standings: NASCAR Style

DISCLAIMER: Idea quite shamelessly stolen from BackmarkersF1's "Alternate WDC". However, this is much more ambitious and pointless. So there.

"If you and I are running in an election and I make the rules, no matter how popular you are, I'll screw you every time". That's a rough approximation of what our professor of American politics told us during the first lesson. While it concerned elections and other forms of political decision-making, you can surely extrapolate that to any other form of competition, such as sports.
As a professional sport that operates mostly through championships and continuous events, autosport is hugely rule-dependent. While to the casual observer, that rule dependency is mostly seen in steward decisions and technical regulations, the sporting regulations side of it all also plays a huge part. Since racing is rarely a standalone event, the different types of it are full of complex points systems that follow a recurring pattern but differ in scale and selectiveness.
Let's take, for instance, the two subjects of today's little example - NASCAR and F1. It is quite natural that the two championships would have different scoring systems due to inconsistent grid sizes and the number of events. However, while F1 only rewards less than 42% of its grid with points, the American series hands them out to every participant. And, while both series place extreme value on winning (as is epitomized in NASCAR's campaign titled "Nothing Beats First Place"), the advantage a race winner gets is not proportional. It's 25 for first, 18 for second in F1, yet 46 for first and 43 for second in NASCAR (bonus points not included).
As such, it would be a fun exercise to see just how much impact a series' scoring system has on the standings. And I'll do just that since it's a Sunday, there's barely any racing and I got jack shit to do. This is F1 2012 by NASCAR rules.

First, I do feel I need to clarify what the NASCAR scoring rules are:

• As the maximum amount of drivers taking part in a NASCAR race is 43, that's the amount of points the winner gets. The points awarded for finishing in a certain place follow an arithmetic progression, with each next finisher receiving 1 point less than the previous. However, to encourage fighting for the win, NASCAR award 3 bonus points to the driver in first place, effectively making it 46 for the win, while the amount for every other place is unchanged. This scoring system awards consistency to a much greater extent than F1 as every finish is valuable and DNFing is a bit of a disaster.
• To counter that, NASCAR doesn't exactly have a distinction between being classified and non-classified. To receive points for the race, you don't have to complete a certain percentage of the race distance like in F1. If you started, you're getting your points - you're just not getting a lot of them if you happen to end your race in a wall.
• Each driver, who finished at least one lap of the race in first, will get a bonus point after the race. The driver who lead the most laps during a race gets another bonus point. As such, you effectively get 47 or 48 points for winning.

Obviously, I took a few creative liberties with applying this system to F1. Even though HRT drivers Pedro de la Rosa and Narain Karthikeyan could not qualify for the first race of 2012, I awarded them the points as if they finished in 23rd and 24th (based on their qualifying results). I did the same for Timo Glock, who didn't start the European Grand Prix due to being ill (even though he didn't take part in qualifying either), and Vitaly Petrov, whose car gave up on him before the start of the British Grand Prix.

The revised standings

The implementation of a new scoring system has had a pretty sizeable effect on the virtual standings. While the first three places remain virtually unchanged (even though Alonso's lead is not quite so sizeable), the rest of the field is significantly different. Here's the list of the major changes:

• Due to Raikkonen's impressive consistency, he'd be occupying 4th in the championship, ahead of Lewis who had a 19th place and a retirement.
• Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado would be much lower in the standings due to their proneness to accidents.
• Same goes for Michael Schumacher, whose terrible run of luck would put him last out of the drivers who don't race for the new teams.
• Even though the new teams would now be capable of scoring points, that would impact the standings rather predictably. The Caterham drivers would occupy 19th and 20th place with Heikki ahead. The Marussia drivers would be in 21st and 22nd with Timo ahead. The HRT drivers would be 23rd and 24th with Pedro ahead.
• Due to being fairly consistent finishers, Perez, di Resta and Massa would do much better in the standings.
• The positions of teammates in the standings in relation to each other would largely remain the same with the only exceptions being Williams, STR and HRT.

The Chase

One of the most fun aspects about the regular season of NASCAR is the Chase for the Sprint Cup. The Chase is sort of like the playoffs in other American sports, effectively splitting the NASCAR season in two. The first 26 out of 36 races are a bit like the regular season with drivers trying to qualify for the Chase. At the end of that, 12 drivers are selected, their points reset to 2000 (not counting the bonuses they receive).
When that happens, the fight for the championship effectively starts with 12 drivers having realistic chances of taking it.
The 12 drivers who are eligible for the Chase consist of the 10 who occupy the top 10 places in the standings at the time and 2 "wild cards". The wild cards are the drivers who occupy a place from 11th to 20th and have the most wins. If drivers are equal on wins, whoever has the most points goes through. If they're equal on points as well (as Jeff Gordon and Ryan Newman currently are), then the standard procedure of "most second, third, fourth, fifth etc. place finishes" is applied.
If we apply to F1 and keep the proportions in check, the "regular season" part of 2012 would be 14 races long and would end with the Singapore Grand Prix. Rather unexpectedly, people like Massa and di Resta would be set to make the Chase, despite their rather ordinary seasons. However, both Grosjean and Hulkenberg would be extremely close to making it as well.
The "wild card" spots would go to Hulkenberg, as he has the most points out of the 11-20 drivers, and Maldonado, thanks to his win in Spain.
Perhaps we should be thankful that the F1 scoring system is as it is.