It’s not commerce that really grabs them in Formula One — it’s philosophy. That’s why they have come up with this fascinating experiment, one clearly designed to answer one of the most profound questions in sport. Is sport all about winning? Or is it about other things as well?

It is a damascene conversion for a sport that previously believed that being second was pretty good. But now the traditional points system has been abandoned and the Formula One drivers’ World Championship will be decided on the question of who won the most races. Everything else is flumdiddle.

For many years Formula One gave ten points to a winner, six to second place. In 2003, they changed this to give eight points to the second-place finisher, a futile effort to make the sport exciting during the years of dominance by Michael Schumacher.

Now — and bizarrely, after the most exciting finish to a Formula One season ever witnessed — they have done away with this system. Second? Ha! Who wants second? The silver medal is the one that they give to the first loser. Who remembers who got the minor medals?

Sport is about winning. Only two places in sport: first and last. Oh, and a tie is like kissing your sister, right?

This is a philosophy as old, in a sense, as sport itself, but first voiced openly in the United States, keen to make plain the difference between themselves and the decadent, effete nations of older civilisations. It is a philosophy that we have come to embrace in this country as well — but rather half-heartedly.

We still have a soft spot for losers. If you run your eyes down the list of the winners of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, you will find plenty of losers grinning away with the trophy gleaming in their hands, unfazed by the thought that they got it without coming first in anything.

David Beckham won it in 2001, merely for seeing that England qualified for the World Cup finals the next year. Michael Owen won it three years earlier as England reached the last 16 in the World Cup. Greg Rusedski won it in 1997 for being a losing finalist at the US Open. Damon Hill won it in 1994 for almost winning the World Championship. And in 1990 Paul Gascoigne won it for losing a World Cup semi-final in floods of tears and failing to take a penalty in the shoot-out.

Draws are part of football the world over. To try to win at home and draw away is the way league football — the basic form of the game — works wherever football is played. The Americans introduced the shoot-out in the 1970s because a draw — a tie, as they have to call it — is unacceptable to the American mind. This involved a five-second one-on-one run at goal from 35 yards. This has since been abandoned, but the rest of football has always had draws.

In cricket, the draw lends fascination to Test matches. We still salute Mike Atherton, the England captain at the time, for his innings in Johannesburg in 1995, which gave England an unlikely draw. All it took was 645 minutes, 492 balls and 185 runs; it was with this innings that Atherton proved he had what it takes to be a Times columnist.

It was the joy with which Australia celebrated the draw at Old Trafford in 2005 that allowed England to scent blood; that draw was an essential part of the majestically convoluted plot of that unforgettable summer.

Not that the English, or the British, if you prefer, aren’t perfectly capable of adopting the winning-is-everything mentality if it suits our purpose. In 1968, David Hemery won the 400 metres hurdles at the Olympic Games in Mexico City and David Coleman, the BBC commentator, carried away by this magnificent bit of sport, blurted out: “And who cares who’s third?”