F1's 6 worst rules ever

Double points

Imagine spending your entire season racing, comfortably beating the rest of the field, you’ve won ten races where your nearest challenger has just five. And then, at the final round, none of that matters because simply being beaten by your team-mate will be enough to overturn that entire season.

That’s what awaited Lewis Hamilton at the final round of the 2014 F1 season. F1 had, for some unknown reason, decided to make the final race of the season worth double points. Hamilton came into the last round 17 points clear of team-mate Nico Rosberg, which would have meant a quite extraordinary set of results (in a season where the pair’s Mercedes cars were supreme) would have been needed to change the result. In fact Hamilton was champion if he finished no lower than sixth ­– in a season where he hadn’t finished a race lower than third.

But now 50 points were on offer for the win, so if Rosberg won the race, suddenly Hamilton could finish no lower than third. The explanation? Well, none really. In the end Rosberg didn’t score points and Hamilton won, which ended up meaning the Brit won the championship by nearly 70 points...

Dropped points scored

It’s not just modern F1 that messes around with its points system. For many years Formula 1, and to be fair many other motorsport series, worked with a scoring system that meant you really didn’t know how many points you were on your way to getting.

At the end of the season your worst scores (and the number depended on the year) would be dropped, there are many vague explanations as to why this was in place. Some said it was to allow some drivers to skip races in the early days and still be in contention for the title, others said it helped negate reliability issues, back when they were far more regular. In reality there seemed to be no real reason.

So come the final race, you would have to take each points score and remove one. Not only was it a bit silly, making several races of the season both figuratively and literally pointless for every driver, it also cost at least one championship. In 1988 Alain Prost scored 105 points to Ayrton Senna’s 94, but by the time they’d removed a full five races’ worth of points... Senna was the champion.

Grooved tyres

The FIA wanted to slow the cars down for 1998. Rather than change the regulations wholesale, the powers that be decided to just cut some big grooves down all four tyres. That meant the cars ran for the next decade with tyres that looked weird and provided less than adequate grip to the drivers.

The result was some slightly slower cars and engineers focusing on changing the aerodynamics of the cars to regain the speed lost in mechanical grip. As we all know that meant in a few years’ time the cars could no longer follow each other. At this point the cars were still lumbered with grooved tyres that the drivers hated and that looked stupid, so all around F1 was on a downslope. Bridgestone tried to make them interesting by using the groove to identify the tyre compound, but in 2009 they were binned. F1 hasn’t looked back since.

Aggregate qualifying

F1 has spent a lot of its lifetime fiddling with qualifying “for the show”. The current knock-out system works well, and the old 60 minute session allowed for a good spread of interesting runs.

But in the mid-2000s Formula 1 spent its time trying to change things almost for change’s sake. In 2003 it introduced one-shot qualifying, where each driver literally got just one lap to set their grid position. It was meant to introduce some jeapordy, make a mistake and you’re gonna lose out. In reality it barely made a difference.

So for the 2005 season F1 tried to shake it up again. In came aggregate qualifying. On Saturday drivers would do a lap in low-fuel qualifying trim. Then Sunday morning would add one with their race start fuel in. Add the two together and bingo, a grid.

What it actually caused was news outlets not to have a story to publish on Saturday and, since fast cars are fast and slow cars are slow no matter the fuel amount, to just pull the grid further apart. The Sunday session did absolutely nothing for the grid. It was, unsurprisingly, dropped after just six races, one-shot qualifying was dropped entirely at the end of the year.

Fuel credit qualifying

From 2003 until 2010 F1 cars did the most important part of qualifying with the fuel from the first stint of the race in the tank (refuelling was legal at this point). That firstly meant that the third part of qualifying (come the knock out era) tended to be slower than the Q2 times.

The other knock-on effect was that teams were reticent to do many laps, as the more they did the less fuel they had to start the race, meaning the sessions were about to get quite boring –ten minutes of no cars on track and then one lap each.

To counter this, and try and make sure that qualifying was watchable at the track and not dropped by broadcasters unwilling to show an empty track for ten minutes, the FIA introduced a fuel credit system. For each lap a car completed in the final part of qualifying, they got some fuel back.

The result was what became known as the “fuel burn phase”. The cars would head straight out and lap the track for ten minutes to burn fuel, and in order to maximise the return and reduce problems, they would all do it at reduced pace. So rather than an empty track we got 15 minutes of cars just circulating without setting an interesting time – Q3 used to be 20 minutes long. The fuel credit system was dropped in 2008, the race fuel qualifying section went with refueling in 2010.

DRS

“But F1 would be boring without it” is what some of you are going to say. Well I say it’s boring with it.

DRS arrived into the world in 2011, when F1 was at its wits end trying to work out how to make the sport interesting again after years of aerodynamic development making the cars drive further and further apart. The premise is simple, if you’re within one second of the car in front a slot opens up in your rear wing for extra straight line speed.

But there were caveats. The slot only opens up for a certain amount of time in certain areas of the track. But it was also activated by following any car, no matter if it was being lapped.

The distances of DRS zones have been constantly debated, the effectiveness changes race to race and the overall usefulness of the system has constantly been questioned. When once it perhaps made sense, when the super-high downforce cars were being used, now the cars have been redesigned to allow them to follow closer DRS’s continuing existence is pretty pointless.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.