Who would have won a separate F1 Sprint Race championship in 2023 using Sunday race points?

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The final sprint race of the 2023 Formula 1 season has been completed and there are now just three races left before the end of the year.

Max Verstappen has already walked away with his third consecutive driver’s championship after dominating the campaign.

However, there have been suggestions to change the format of the weekends in 2024.

Martin Brundle believes that qualifying might move back to Saturday afternoon as it currently takes place after one practice session on Friday.

Another Sky Sports F1 pundit, Karun Chandhok, has also suggested creating a separate championship for the sprint races next year.

This has raised an interesting question about what the standings would look like in 2023 if each sprint race result was included in its own table using the points from Sunday’s main races.

Unsurprisingly, Max Verstappen still comes out on top, but there are a few surprises below him in the standings.

Extending the points down to tenth place also gave several drivers a small boost in their standings.

Two veterans of the sport have also seen their place in the rankings fall compared to the normal standings after struggling on Saturdays compared to Sundays.

How the 2023 Sprint Races standings would look?

As expected, using the 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 points system with a bonus point for the fastest lap, Max Verstappen leads the way with 136 points.

His teammate Sergio Perez would comfortably finish second, something he’s trying to achieve in the main standings ahead of Lewis Hamilton.

Speaking of the Brit, he would fall four places to seventh, with just one podium in six sprint race drives in 2023.

Fernando Alonso suffers a similar fate, dropping to tenth after missing out on the top ten altogether in half of this year’s shortened events.

The likes of Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris and George Russell would all move up the table with Russell the best-placed driver without a top-three finish to his name.

It would be fascinating to see how the table would look, especially if in 2024 they used a reverse grid to determine the starting order in each race.