Tour de France - Formula 1 Scoring

I don't know much about the UCI, the governing body for the Tour de France, but I do know a thing or two about motorsport (enough to know bicycles don't have any motors, for one). The Tour de France is an intriguing event, but its scoring is confusing as all get out. It's scored, nominally, as a rally with a cumulative time for all the stages, but with a few critical differences.

 
One thing that confounds me is how the Tour treats time. As a rally, that should be the criteria, but the UCI  will give a bunch of riders all the same time if they finish close to each other. Differences of several seconds in the actual crossing of the line will be erased, and everyone in the group will be lumped together and all receive the same time. Maybe when they first invented this, they lacked the ability to measure and just never modernized their scoring. Who knows?

Then, after this homogenizing, they'll reward some riders with time bonuses, artifically separating them back out again. In a race for time, I find it startling that they'd give precious seconds out as a reward. I mean, baseball doesn't give you tenths of runs for extremely long home runs, golf doesn't shave fractions of a stroke for particularly difficult putts. No sport that I can think of modifies whatever it is you're scoring, none except bicycle racing.

Even stranger is the UCI's discarding of the defining feature of every other rally: consistent equipment. One of the defining characteristics of a rally is finishing with the same vehicle you started with. A good part of the challenge is keeping your car or motorcycle together, but in the Tour the riders are not only permitted to use a separate bike for each stage, they don't even need to finish any particular stage on the same bike they started with. They can, and do, swap bikes during the stages, so the rally is depending only on the rider, not his or her bike.

That's just plain weird.

Well, it's weird for a rally, but not at all strange for most racing series. Each round of the World's Driver Championship (F1) or any other racing series can be run with a different vehicle, one specialized for that track or whatever. Since this is exactly what's done in the Tour, I think it would make more sense to score it that way.

I picked the Formula 1 scoring system because it's the easiest. Hell, it's simplicity itself. The winner of each round (stage) gets ten points, as does his team for the constructor's points. Thus, if Fernando Alonzo wins, both he and Renault get ten points.

Second place earns eight points, Third six points. Fourth place gets you five points, Fifth, four points, and so on down to eighth place, which earns you a single point. No "bonuses," no complicated, additional rules, just points for the first eight finishers. In chart form, it looks like this:

Place    Points
1st        10
2nd         8
3rd         6
4th         5
5th         4
6th         3
7th         2
8th         1

A child can understand it.

I'm looking at the results for each stage of the Tour de France and scoring the race using the F1 system. I don't know if the "official stage results" include those bizarre "time bonuses" or not, but the results are fairly interesting, I think. Every day or so I'll update this page with the current "offical" Tour de France classification for overall winner and also include my own standings, based on F! scoring. I'll include the team scoring as well. I was going to do the bicycle manufacturers as well, but I don't think supplier is giving bikes to more than one team.