Some F1 Champions Would Have Lost Their Titles Under Today’s Rules

Ayrton Senna won his first world title in 1988 with 90 points to Alain Prost’s 87. Except Prost didn’t actually score 87 points that year. He scored 105, eleven more than Senna. Under the scoring rules F1 uses today, Prost would have been champion. Under the rules that actually applied in 1988, he wasn’t even close.

A rulebook that punished consistency

For most of the 1980s, F1 didn’t count every result toward the championship. Drivers could only keep their best eleven finishes from sixteen races, with anything beyond that simply discarded. It sounds like a technicality. In 1988 it decided the title.

Prost finished on the podium in fourteen of the sixteen races that year, seven wins and seven second places, a run of consistency almost unmatched in the sport’s history. But because only his best eleven results counted, six of those points got wiped from his tally, dropping him from 105 to 87.

Senna, with eight wins and three second places, had his own points reduced too, but by far less, leaving him on 90. Prost had genuinely scored more over the season. He still lost.

The teammate problem nobody could avoid

What makes 1988 sting even more in hindsight is that Senna and Prost were teammates at McLaren, driving what was by far the fastest car on the grid that year. McLaren won fifteen of the sixteen races between them, meaning the title was always going to come down to which of the two men out-scored the other, with almost no interference from anyone else. There was no rival team to blame, no mechanical disaster to point to. Just two drivers in identical cars, separated in the end by a scoring quirk rather than outright pace.

Prost never hid his frustration. He went on to become one of the loudest advocates for reforming the system, and the sport dropped the dropped-scores rule entirely from the 1991 season onward, moving to a system where every result counted toward the total. It was too late to change what happened to him in 1988.

The following season, in 1989, the two McLaren teammates were still fighting for the same title, and this time the numbers worked out very differently. Prost won it with 76 points to Senna’s 60, a genuinely comfortable margin, before leaving to join Ferrari the following year still carrying some resentment over how 1988 had gone. Senna would get his own retribution a year after that, in 1990, in a title battle that ended not with a scoring quirk but with the two of them colliding at the first corner in Japan.

A pattern that shows up more than once

Prost’s 1988 season isn’t the only time F1’s shifting rules have shaped who actually walked away with a title. The sport has used wildly different points systems across its history: fewer points on offer, different numbers of scorers per race, fastest-lap bonuses that came and went, and various rules about how many results counted.

Run several historical seasons through today’s system and a handful of champions would change, not because anyone drove differently, but because the maths behind the trophy wasn’t the same maths we use now.

That’s a strange thing for a sport built on lap times and stopwatches to admit: that some of its championships were decided as much by administrative rules as by what happened on track.

If a driver genuinely outscored a rival across an entire season, should the trophy go to whoever won more races instead, or does rewarding consistency over sheer number of wins make for a fairer champion?