First to be clear, I'm in agreement with the principle of the driver with the most wins winning the drivers WDC. Winning GPs is what the drivers championship is all about for me.
Interesting though if you look at the last 4 years, the driver with the most wins has won the drivers championship. This doesn't mean that we can be complacent over the current points system though. It's just that in recent history drivers who were in a position to win the WDC were in cars that could also win lots of GPs. This year's been a very strange in my memory of F1 with the Hamilton and Massa being so inconsistent that it has allowed Kubica to stay in the hunt with a relatively underperforming car. But if we have a few seasons where the field is very close and lots of different drivers can expect to win a race, then the current system will be shown to reward consistent points scoring over risk taking for a potential win. Not my idea of F1!
Just to see how little difference a change to the points system would make look at the following tables for the WDC 2004-2007.
http://img291.imageshack.us/my.php?imag ... ingdl7.jpg
On the left is the drivers table using the points system used for that year. on the right is the position he would have finished if the drivers were ranked on the number of wins. Any drivers with the same number of wins (that includes zero wins) are ordered by the number of second places. If they have the same number of second places they are ordered by the number of third places - and so on down the placings until we have a unique position for each driver.
As you can see such a change wouldn't have altered the outcome of the championship for the last 4 years. In fact there are only a few noticable movers - Wurz up 4 places in 2007, Barrichello down 4 places in 2006, Ralf down 3 places and Heidfeld up 3 place in 2005, Button and Alonso both down 3 places and Raikkonen up 4 places in 2004.
So what would be the point of changing. Well none if you do it retrospectively. But if the drivers know of the new scoring system then there would be more incentive for battling for their best finish of the season, say a fourth place, as this would catapult them in to a new peer group of competitors that also have a fourth place as their best finish of the year to date.
What I wanted to show with this table was that it can't stop someone romping away with the title - Schumacher 2004. His complete domination of the first half of the season would have wrapped up the championship by the 12th round if it was based on the number of wins. In fact it is remarkably unradical in changing the final standings of drivers. So we can have our cake and eat it. The best driver/car still wins the WDC, but there is now a big incentive to fight for every position - that 2nd place could be vital at the end of the season if it is your best chance of a 2nd place this season.
As you can see we don't need any medals (stupid idea, F1 is about as far from the olympics as you could get) and drivers in the middle order still have incentive to fight for position as every position affects your final championship standing. If you can go out and win just one GP all season you'll be guaranteed to be ahead of all those drivers who couldn't. Now wouldn't that be something interesting to see
sources for finishes in each race as follows, appologies for any mistakes:
http://www.astro.livjm.ac.uk/~cjs/f1/chart04.gif
http://f1.gpupdate.net/en/seasons/2005/ ... s/drivers/
http://en.f1-live.com/f1/en/standings/index2006.shtml
http://en.f1-live.com/f1/en/standings/index2007.shtml