Formula One / Ralph Ellis / 18 March 2009 /

In an erudite discussion of the decision to change the rules of the Formula One Driver's Championship, Ralph Ellis reflects on the strange death of accountability and considers which drivers might flourish under the new system.

They shut the Post Office at the top of my road recently. The decision was first announced as a proposal, and then they began a consultation period. To my knowledge not a single person said anything other than that the Post Office, which always had a queue of people waiting to use it, should stay open. There was a petition to keep it alive with nearly 10,000 signatures. And then when the consultation period ended it shut anyway.

I wonder whether the people in charge of that decision took advice from Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley. The men who run Formula One racing seem just as oblivious to the opinions of everybody else.

They announced yesterday a drastic shake-up of the way the world champion will be decided, ripping up six decades of history in one fell swoop. From this season the champion driver will be the one who wins most races, regardless of where he finishes in any of the others. (Except, just to keep it all confusing, they will also keep the points system to decide the order if two drivers finish on an equal number of wins).

The idea is to encourage more risk taking in races from drivers who have to win - but quite how that will work on some of the circuits where overtaking is virtually impossible is hard to understand.

The immediate effect on the betting market is that no one driver is a clear favourite. Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Raikkonen lead the way on [5.9], with Fernando Alonso next in the betting at [6.2] and Felipe Massa [6.4]. Jenson Button, whose new Brawn GP car has performed surprisingly well in practice, is a generous [11.0] and that might be worth a punt if he has a few good races and can get away with his car breaking down in others.

If the new rules had been in force last year Lewis Hamilton wouldn't have been world champion. He won five races to Felipe Massa's six - and predictably Hamilton and his McLaren team have criticised the change. "It has to be the team and driver who do the best job over the year who are champions," said Hamilton. "We work hard as a team to win and be consistent, and being consistent whether you finish first or third."

It's a dramatic change in rules just 10 days before the first race of the season gets to the starting grid in Melbourne on Sunday week. And all the more surprising because the car constructors all opposed the idea when it was first raised some months ago. Ferrari's Luca di Montezemolo, president of the Formula One Teams' Association, said: "We want to express our disappointment because these decisions have been taken in a unilateral manner."

But then that's just more evidence that when it comes to Formula One, Ecclestone remains the only man who matters - just like the bloke who shut my Post Office.

Five things you might not know about Bernie Ecclestone

1. Currently the 24th richest man in Britain with a fortune worth £2.4billion, he left school in Kent at 16 to work in the local gas works

2. His hobby was motorcycles and he started making extra money trading in spare parts for them - then began his first company with a friend called Fred Compton to begin a motorcycle dealership

3. He tried racing cars himself but gave up after an accident and another failed attempt to qualify for the 1958 Monaco Grand Prix

4. He was the first person to own a Mercedes CLS55 AMG - then had two wheels stolen off it while it was parked outside his home in London

5. In 2004 he sold another of his London homes - Kensington Palace Gardens - to steel magnate Lakshi Mittal for £57.1million, the most expensive house ever sold in Britain

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