Proposed changes to the F1 Points Scoring system

The hole in the scoreboard

Formula 1 pays points to ten finishers: 25 for a win, then 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 and 1. With 22 cars on the grid, that means twelve of them leave every race with nothing, however well they drove.

The constructors’ championship has exactly the same problem. A team can run 11th and 12th all afternoon, its best result of the year, and its line in the table does not move.

It is not a small effect. The 2025 season had 24 grands prix with 20 cars on each grid, so 480 places to fill. Exactly half of them, 240, paid nothing. On 184 of those occasions the driver had finished the race and been classified, and still went home with no points at all.

The result is a championship table that is really only about the top four teams. Everybody else is racing hard for a scoreboard that mostly cannot see them, and fans who follow a smaller team have very little to chart beyond the odd lucky weekend.

The proposal

Double the top, then keep paying all the way down.

A win becomes worth 50 points. The top five are a straight doubling of today’s scale: 50, 36, 30, 24 and 20. That keeps the pecking order at the sharp end exactly as fans know it, and a win is still worth 1.39 times a second place, as it is now.

Below that the steps get gentler, so that every place is worth fighting for: 17, 15, 13, 12 and 11 for sixth to tenth, then 10 down to 1 point for 20th. Sprint races would double as well, from 8–1 to 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2. Only classified finishers score, so a retirement or disqualification is still worth nothing.

One footnote: the 2025 grid had 20 cars, so every classified finisher would score. On the 22-car grid of 2026 the two back-markers would still miss out, and extending the scale to 22nd would be an easy tweak.

Why it works for everyone

Smaller teams get a season to follow

Bringing two cars home in 12th and 15th would earn 15 points, worth 30% of a race win. Today that afternoon scores nothing. Suddenly a team’s progress can be seen in the table week by week, which is what a championship is meant to show.

Drivers are judged on the whole season

A driver who beats the car every weekend currently has nothing to show for it unless the car happens to be quick enough to reach tenth. Under the new scale, consistent over-performance in the midfield turns into points, and young drivers build a record that team bosses can actually read. Yuki Tsunoda scored in 7 races in 2025. On the proposed scale he scores in 23.

Fans get more battles that matter

A fight for 14th is a fight for points. Every overtake in the pack now changes a number on the screen, so broadcasters have a reason to show it and fans have a reason to care. It also gives smaller teams’ sponsors something measurable, and gives any new entrant a realistic route onto the board in its first season.

The sport gets a truer table

Because more results count, a single lucky weekend distorts the picture less. The table is measuring a season rather than a handful of good Sundays. That is a better way to reward a team that has actually improved.

What about the downsides?

A change this big needs to survive some awkward questions, so here are the ones that matter.

Does it cheapen a win?

Not at the front. The gap between first and second doubles from 7 points to 14. The honest trade-off is that a win becomes a smaller slice of the pie: 24.8% of the points on offer in a race today, and 17.7% under the new scale, because more places are being paid. It is the one number that moves the wrong way, and it is the price of paying twenty places rather than ten.

Prize money and contracts

This is the big one for teams. Prize money is tied to where a team finishes in the constructors’ championship, so anything that reshuffles the order moves real money. Bonus clauses in driver and staff contracts are often written around points totals, too. The sensible answer is notice: announce the change a full season ahead, so teams can renegotiate, and re-base bonus clauses against the new scale.

The record books

A title-winning season would run to roughly 850 points instead of 420, so raw totals would not compare with history. Formula 1 has done this before; the win was worth 10 points until 2010, when it became 25. Publishing both totals side by side for a few seasons would keep the archive honest.

Are we rewarding people for just finishing?

Twentieth place earns one point, which is 2% of a win. Retirements and disqualifications still score nothing, and that matters: Ferrari had three weekends in 2025 where neither car scored, and that would still be true under the new system. There is one behavioural risk worth watching, which is that midfield drivers may be more inclined to bank a finish. But steps of one or two points between places leave plenty of reason to race.

2025, replayed

We took every result from the 2025 season, all 24 grands prix and six sprints, and re-scored them using the proposed scale.

The finishing positions are the real ones, taken from the official results, and our recalculation of today’s system matches the published 2025 standings for all 21 drivers and 10 teams. Disqualifications stand, and ties are settled on countback as they are in real life. One assumption is ours: sprint points are doubled. Everything else is held constant, which is the big caveat. Drivers would race differently if the scoring were different, so this is a replay rather than a prediction.

The constructors’ championship

The headline is that the order at the front barely moves, but the story behind it does. McLaren still win comfortably. Red Bull would have finished second, ahead of Mercedes, and Haas would have taken sixth place from Racing Bulls and Aston Martin, who each drop a place.

The bigger shift is at the bottom. Alpine finished the real season on 22 points, 16% of Williams’ total. Replayed, they finish on 271, which is 54% of Williams’ total and a real season of racing to follow.

The season as it unfolded

Here is the season as it might have been told week by week. There is a complete round-by-round table at the end of this section if you want every number.

The drivers’ championship

Below the top three, the new scale rewards the drivers who scored regularly in the midfield. Yuki Tsunoda rises five places, from 17th to 12th, and Isack Hadjar and Oliver Bearman each gain two. Nico Hülkenberg drops four places and Fernando Alonso three, as the drivers who were regularly finishing just outside the points make up ground.

The verdict

This is a rare change that costs the front of the grid nothing and gives the back of it a season.

The top of the scale keeps its shape, winning is still what matters most, and the champion is still the driver who was best over the whole year. What changes is that Alpine’s season, Haas’s season and every other smaller team’s season now appears in the table. The downsides are real, mainly around prize money and contracts, but they are questions of transition rather than principle, and the fix is simply notice.

It also seems, frankly, to be the obvious thing to do. Every Sunday, twenty drivers are asked to go flat out, and only ten of them are counted.