It's about time.

Formula 1 has introduced a new points system which will result in the driver with most wins crowned 2009 champion.The current points system will still operate to decide a tie if two drivers have the same wins and to define all other championship positions.

Only 50 years too late. Finally, no more rewards for drivers tooling around in 2nd or 3rd position and playing the points. If this scoring system was in place since 1950:

This certainly changes the legacies of the "golden era":

If only the official records could be changed to retroactively award past titles to the "real" winners -- Clark and Senna tied with Prost with four titles each; Prost loses two titles ('86 and '89) that he won without the most race victories, but picks up two in which he did win the most races ('83 and '84); Moss would lose the dubious honor of being the "best driver never to win a world championship"; Mansell would become a well-deserved three-time champion; the historically overrated (in my opinion) Piquet and Lauda would drop from three titles each to just one; Jones and Andretti would both be two-time champions; and, of course, Massa would have earned the 2008 title over Hamilton (which pains me, because I was pulling for Hamilton all year, but fair is fair...). Fascinating, too, that three third-place championship finishers would have been world champions under a fair scoring system!

The rest of the multi-championship winners -- Ascari, Fangio, Brabham, G. Hill, Stewart, Fittipaldi, Hakkinen and Shumacher -- won all of their championships fairly by scoring the most victories; many of those titles, however, would have been settled on points to break ties on total victories. In 1982, for example, five drivers scored two wins each, yet the title went to Rosberg with only a single victory.

Update 3/18: The Telegraph covers this same theme today. For some reason, they claim that Prost would have also beaten Piquet in 1981, but I don't see how -- Piquet had three race victories, Prost only two. They also claim Brabham would have won no titles under present rules; how they arrive at that conclusion is beyond me -- Brabham had five wins in '60 to Moss' two, and in '59 would have won a three-way tie between with Moss and Brooks, each with two victories but with Brabham coming out ahead in points.