WDC With Only One Or Two Race Wins - Good Or Bad? POLL

Question, how would you feel about a WDC that after 17 races would only have won one, maybe two races? In other words, they managed to finish second or third virtually every race. Is that a true champion?

 

Yes. Consistency throughout the season is the hallmark of the great driver and team.

 

I think Hamilton's good, but he's not nearly close to God

 

Sorry, I went back and corrected my typing error.

 

Ya it sux he retired last year...

 

One or two wins, OK. No wins? kinda shady.

 

WDC World Driving Champion

not World Winning Champion

Keke Rosberg, 1982 champ with 1 win. One more lap and he would not have won that race, either.

 

2nd place is the first loser. You play to win the game. It shows that on any given race weekend he was not the best driver in the field.

 

I miss Juan Pablo too

 

It depends on whether it will help or hurt SF IMHO.

 

Agreed.

 

Five different drivers won two races that year, but nobody won more than two.

In 1958, Mike Hawthorn with one win (in 11 events), beat Sterling Moss (who had four wins) by one point.


On the other side of the fence, in 1952, Alberto Ascari won six of the eight events, taking fastest lap for seven (and splitting the eighth), but could only count his top four finishes, for a 36 point "perfect" score.

In 1963, Jim Clark won seven of the ten events, but could only count his top six finishes. But Clark was the only driver to win more than six events in a season until Senna won eight of the *16* events in 1988.

 

Exactly! Thats why teams that start strong and fall off (or finish strong and start weak) don't usually win.

 

NOPE. a true champion always aims to win races, not finish 2nd...

 

agreed but then if your team tells you to hold place ? In there defence they would rather have two cars finishing for constructers title thus a conflict and there are to many rules as it is so leave to see how it unfolds however it would seem wrong to win WDC without a win

 

Lauda won the 1977 WDC with 3 wins; are you going to tell me he's not a true champion?

Rosberg won because GV was killed and DP nearly so; when I think of "F1 1982" I think of GV's and DP's accidents first and foremost....

 

I agree.

 

I think if you look at the structure of the points system, it would be exceedingly hard for driver A with 1-2 wins to beat driver B with 4-6 wins, UNLESS driver B had a bunch of DNF's or regularly finished outside the points, and driver A was always on the podium.

You could then turn the question around and say... "On balance, who has done a better job? Someone who was in the hunt for a win all year and was always on podium, or another guy who got lucky a few times and didn't even place the rest of the time". In that situation, it would be wrong for the driver who scored 4-5 wins to get the WDC when antoher guy had done better, *on balance*, during the season.

IMO it's one of those things that sounds good - sort of like "lets raise taxes on the rich". When you say things like "did you know the top 1% of people in this country got back $200k on average in tax breaks last year?". The man in the street is enraged. They often don't look into the issue any deeper. I wonder if the same phenomenon is at work here - guy B with 4-6 wins would seem to deserve the WDC more than A with only 1-2 wins. But for A to be ahead, if you look deeper into the numbers, A would have to have placed well in just about every race, whereas B did well in a few, and very badly in others.

And actually, is this a big issue in outcomes over the years? Have there been cases in the last 20 years where a driver won the WDC with a significantly lower number of wins than any of the runners up? I wonder - I'd think no but I could be wrong about that.

 

I wouldn't say that at all.

The Ferrari that year was an ill-handling unreliable machine, from everything I have read. (But yes, it had ungodly horsepower).

Beyond that, back then, people were getting killed all the time, Keke had no control over that, he just plodded along and did the best he could. Why do you race your butt off for second ? Because the leader can always drop out - it happens all the time. Ask the Renault drivers from 1982...

 

There is no way you could ever accuse Keke of just plodding along. I still remember watching the epic battles between him and Gilles in Formula Atlantic from when i was growing up in Canada. They were pretty much two of a kind in how they approached racing. F1 could do with a few more of their kind!

ian

 

I must say it must be really frustrating for a driver to score 6 wins but lose the championship to someone with 1-2 wins but who scored consistently.

Personally I would like the guy with the higher wins to clinch the championship from a sporting standpoint. The reason: Its easy for an Alonso to settle for seconds and thirds like he did in 2005 against Kimi and against Michael (at least in the first half of 2006). He didn't feel the pressure to push it to the limit to grab the win. All he needed to do was try to keep the gap from closing up too much.

To make it possible we need a four points or more gap between first and second. This will force everyone to fight for wins - you can't use points consistency as a crutch to cruise and collect.

Now that Michael is gone and Ferrari are no longer invincible, a points restructure is well overdue.

 

Franco-you are thinking of the 1981 126C1; Ferrari won the CC in 1982 with the C2.