Medal System

There has been much talk about a possible gold, silver, bronze medal system. Whereby the person with the most gold medals wins the championship. Personally I am torn. Part of me thinks it’s a great idea and would stop boring percentage drives from Lewis Hamilton at the end of the season. It would reward ballsy all out win or nothing drives like Kimi Raikkonen (Spa 2008).

But Bernie Ecclestone likes to change the points system depending on how championships are turning out. After the Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost battle of the late 80s he changed the best results system. To an all counting 10, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 points system. Then when Schumacher was too dominant he changed it to reward second place more with 8 points for second going down to eighth place. Meaning that consistent drivers could stay in contention for the title longer. Now that has bred boring no risk consistent driving he wants to change it again to a gold, silver, bronze medal system. Whereby the person with the most gold medals wins the championship.

However in F1 history it would have left people such as Niki Lauda, who was an amazing driver with only one championship win. He would have still probably won another championship as he would have competed in the final races after he won his first championship.

A medal system would also enable teams like BMW and Renault to run extra risky strategies to try and snatch wins. This would be interesting to watch; especially when they manage to pull it off. It does however leave the also run teams trailing round for no other reason than to be advertising hoardings.

See what you think, the full report is available from the FIA here:

http://www.fia.com/en-GB/mediacentre/pressreleases/f1releases/2009/Pages/f1_medals.aspx

The best thing about a medal system however would have meant that Stirling Moss would have won a championship so perhaps this would have stopped him from going on about being the greatest driver ever and not winning a world championship.