Motor sport rankings

A recent paper highlights an interesting area of application for evolutionary algorithms, the design of optimal ranking policies in motor sports: http://mcis.jsu.edu/faculty/agarrett/docs/MCIS-TR-2009-002.pdf

I always view a motorist as being on some sort of a pareto frontier, as compared to other motorists, when the competition is sequential i.e. points accumulate over time with every race. What can decide the optimal point assignment mechanism e.g. who receives how many points given their rank in a particular race? How will this relate to the ranking in the next race and thus the points given then? These are interesting questions to ask, but very hard to answer.

The aforementioned paper is very interesting as it tries to frame the question and answer it using the idea of ‘the race being a voting mechanism’ that ranks motorists. What is the optimal voting scheme then?