Did the sprint points and fastest lap points make a difference in Formula 1 in 2024?

I'm now two years late with this update on whether fastest lap points made a difference and since then they've removed the fastest lap points. Which I find hilarious because 2025 is one of the rare years where it might have made a difference to an important outcome. But that's for a later post. Let's look at 2024. 

2024 Fastest Laps  

8 different drivers and 4 different constructors won fastest lap points which is higher than the average for drivers (7) and equal to the average for constructors (4).

Constructors’s standings with and without fastest lap points Removing the fastest lap points makes no change in the Constructors’s Title. 

How about in the Drivers's championship? 

Drivers’s Championship standings with and without the fastest lap points Removing the fastest lap points makes no changes to the standings in the drivers’s championship at the end of the season. 

That means if we put together 2024’s results with the calculated total points if there had been fastest laps from 2009-2018, and the actual results in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, 0 constructors results out of 169 have been affected by fastest lap points. 

In the drivers’ championship, the number of results affected is 13/373 (3.49% of all results), and none of those are in the top 3 of any given year. 

Let’s look at the sprint races, which I expect to have a greater effect due to the quite frankly ridiculous number of them and the points available for them. 

The sprint race points were as follows:  

Constructors points from the sprint races:  

Drivers’ points from the sprint races:  

Do the sprint race points have an effect on either championship? 

Constructors' championship with and without the sprint and fastest lap points  

No effect 

After 3 years, sprint points have had an effect on 6/30 constructors positions. 

Drivers' championship with and without the sprint and fastest lap points Bearman moves ahead of Ricciardo on countback (one 7th position versus a best of 8th) 

Giving points to almost half the field 6 times a year changes the position of 1 of the 24 drivers. 

Over 3 years with sprint races, 7/68 drivers results have been changed. 

What have we learned? 

• The pattern that the 1 point for fastest lap is too small to affect anything continued. 

• The sprint races don’t do anything to disturb the existing order, and only strengthen the points totals of the good teams, creating further separation between them and the weaker teams. The top 3 teams got ~ 50 sprint points each, the bottom 3 got 6. 

• Deeply amused that McLaren and Ferrari had the same number of sprint points. 

• The order of the drivers is unusually muddled up. Normally it’s very two by two by two. In 2024, not so much. 

For an awful lot more effort, expense and wear and tear, the sprint races do very little to the overall standings. Which strengthens my feeling that they’re pointless.