When will F1 adopt an elimination round to decide the world champion?

Hard to believe 20 years have passed since NASCAR stopped determining its Cup Series champion by the traditional means of collecting points throughout a full season. Matt Kenseth won the 2003 Cup title despite winning only one race in a year when Ryan Newman won eight times yet finished a distant sixth in the standings. NASCAR despised the notion that Kenseth claimed the crown by ‘points racing’ and in a knee-jerk reaction tried to create a system that would reward winning races. Limited to 10 drivers (later expanded to 12 and then 16), the so-called Chase for the Cup was controversial from the start, especially when NASCAR tweaked the format into elimination-style Playoffs in 2017.

NASCAR’s efforts to inject motor sports with the kind of ‘walk-off’ moments occasionally found in stick-and-ball sports have been generally successful. It’s hard to argue there has been an unworthy champion over the last two decades – and that’s not to say that Kenseth didn’t deserve his 2003 title. But this year, the notoriously heavy-handed sanctioning body’s attempts to manage competition resulted in two of the Cup Series’ three manufacturers trying to manipulate the outcome of the penultimate race to get their drivers into the coveted Final Four who would race for the championship in the season finale.

Toyota persuaded Bubba Wallace to fake a deflating tyre so he would slow and allow Christopher Bell past to gain the position he needed to be among the finalists. Meanwhile, Chevrolet ordered a pair of runners to form a blocking wall protecting a fading William Byron from attack. Both tactics worked; Bell got the place he needed and Byron maintained his position, but half an hour after the race, NASCAR declared Bell ineligible for the championship because he illegally rode the wall while passing Wallace. Byron went unpunished and advanced. In the end, it was anticlimactic as 34-year-old Joey Logano won his third Cup Series crown. Graduating to Cup in 2009 as a teenager earned Logano the derisive nickname ‘Sliced Bread’, but he has lived up to the billing of stock car racing’s next big thing. In a sport where drivers compete into their late-forties and contractually secure with Team Penske, Logano has plenty of runway for further success.

Other forms of racing have adopted a version of NASCAR’s late-season championship reset, including NHRA drag racing and Australian Supercars. When will Formula 1 follow suit?

“Other forms of racing have adopted a version of NASCAR’s late season re-set”

F1 is under American ownership these days, but that didn’t matter when it came to Michael Andretti, as Michael himself seems to have been the sole obstacle in the way of his dream of creating an American F1 team. Within weeks of relinquishing control of the Andretti Global organisation he had steadily expanded since acquiring Barry Green’s IndyCar team in 2002, F1 announced an agreement in principle to allow a customer General Motors team to enter in 2026 before assuming full works status in ’28. Whether F1 rejected Michael because of the blustery way he tried to break into F1’s exclusive club or whether the sport’s current management is somehow still sore over the lack of respect he gave F1 as a driver during his unsuccessful 1993 campaign doesn’t really matter. Neither side covered itself in glory.

Will the Cadillac effort be successful? The prediction is that GM will underestimate the challenge of F1 like Michael did back in the day. Barring an unexpected miracle, August will mark 47 years since Mario Andretti was the last Yank to win an F1 race. The addition of an American team in a couple of years is unlikely to alter that landscape.

Up to 2017, Robert Wickens was better known to European fans through his success in F2 and DTM than he was at home. By 2018, the Canadian was finally achieving some publicity in North America by running at the front as an IndyCar rookie. But it all went wrong when he was swept into an accident on the Pocono oval that sent his car into the catch fence, causing injuries that left him a paraplegic.

Like Clay Regazzoni and Alex Zanardi, Wickens didn’t let the handicap blunt his ambition. In a remarkable eight-day period in the summer of ’22, Wickens teamed with Mark Wilkins to win his first IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge race in a TCR-class Hyundai, welcomed his first child into the world, then won again on home ground at Mosport. Wickens teamed with Harry Gottsacker to win the 2023 IMSA TCR championship, again in a Bryan Herta Hyundai.

From late 2024, Wickens’ Hyundai carried an electronic braking system he developed with Bosch, utilising the tech Bosch created for the hybrid LMDh prototypes that compete in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Bosch stressed that the system could be adapted with relative ease to an LMDh or any other racing car, potentially opening doors for disabled drivers.

Wickens recently signed to drive a GT3-spec Corvette for DXDT Racing in the five ‘sprint’ rounds of the 2025 WeatherTech Championship, starting with Long Beach in April. It’s the latest positive development for one of the sport’s truly good guys.

“I want to raise awareness for disability and for spinal cord injury not just by being a participant,” Wickens says. “I want to be competing and fighting for championships, showing the next generations with disabilities that anything is possible.”

Based in Indianapolis, John Oreovicz has been covering US racing for 30 years. He is author of the 2021 book Indy Split