I was watching the BBC America news this morning and they ran a story on how the current F1 governing body was looking to make a rule change to award the driver’s championship to the driver with the most wins rather than the most points in an effort to make the races more exciting by encouraging more passing.  That means that a driver could potentially win the driver’s championship by winning 3 races and then not finishing the other 13 while someone else could finish in the top 3 all season long but only get 2 wins and go home with nothing.  It discourages consistency.  This year’s champion, Lewis Hamilton, would not have been champion under these rules.  Felipe Massa in a Ferrari would have been the F1 champion for 2008.  This type of rule change seems like an overreaction to me, somewhat similar to what NASCAR keeps trying to do keep things exciting at the expense of the drivers and the teams – the terrible idea of the “Chase for the Cup” where the first 2/3rds of the season are thrown out and the NASCAR champion is chosen based solely off of how well they do in the last 10 races – which means that if you are a racing team your only goal is to be one of the top ten teams by the end of the first 2/3rds of the season, it does you no good to strive to be first through the first 20 races because those points won’t matter.  With the new F1 rules, if you are in any position other than second without any real hope of catching the leader, you may as well pull in the pits and call it a day because nothing you do on the race track will matter – and that will make for a very boring race.

See more here:
Formula 1 Rule Change to Ruin Sport?