  Scoring rules aggregate individual rankings by assigning some points to each
position in each ranking such that the total sum of points provides the overall
ranking of the alternatives. They are widely used in sports competitions
consisting of multiple contests. We study the tradeoff between two risks in
this setting: (1) the threat of early clinch when the title has been clinched
before the last contest(s) of the competition take place; (2) the danger of
winning the competition without finishing first in any contest. In particular,
four historical points scoring systems of the Formula One World Championship
are compared with the family of geometric scoring rules, recently proposed by
an axiomatic approach. The schemes used in practice are found to be competitive
with respect to these goals, and the current rule seems to be a reasonable
compromise close to the Pareto frontier. Our results shed more light on the
evolution of the Formula One points scoring systems and contribute to the issue
of choosing the set of point values.
