This year's Formula One world championship will go to the driver who wins the most races rather than the most points, the sport's governing body said yesterday.

The International Automobile Federation (FIA), which also presented a radical plan for teams to have greater technical freedom in 2010 in exchange for a budget cap, said points would only decide the championship if drivers ended the season with the same number of victories.

The FIA's world motor sport council meeting in Paris rejected a proposal put forward by the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) to change the scoring structure to a 12-9-7-5-4-3-2-1 points format from the existing 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1.

Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone has been pushing for change since McLaren's Lewis Hamilton took last year's crown despite winning fewer races than Ferrari's Brazilian Felipe Massa.

Ecclestone had advocated awarding Olympic-style medals, with the winner of most golds taking the championship, but the FIA ruled that out.

The FIA said points would decide the championship standings from second place downwards while the constructors' championship stayed the same.

With the global financial crisis tightening its grip on the sport, the FIA said teams would be allowed to compete with considerable technical freedom from 2010 providing they accepted a 30 million-pound ($42.18 million) budget cap.

"The aim is to make it easier for new teams to enter and also allow existing teams to participate on much reduced budgets should they so choose," the FIA said.

"In essence, this is a choice between (1) the current freedom to spend and continued adherence to the existing technical constraints and (2) a new degree of freedom to innovate technically but with a severely restricted budget."

FIA president Max Mosley said that he was satisfied the cap was feasible, could be properly policed and had been carefully costed.

"These rules will encourage clever engineering, success will come to the teams with the best ideas, not only the teams with the most money," he said.

Mosley said the cap would include the salaries of drivers and team principal and "everything except the motor home and any fines imposed by the FIA."

In return, the teams would be freed from most of the current restraints with a catch-all clause allowing the FIA to stop anything deemed to be against the spirit of the cap.

FOTA had presented its own proposals to halve the costs of competing next year compared to 2008 but Mosley said more drastic action was required following Honda's decision to withdraw from the sport.

"The worldwide economic crisis has worsened very significantly since (December)," he warned.

"No-one can say the situation will not deteriorate further in the coming months. If this happens, we may lose other manufacturers or even independent teams despite their best intentions.

"If we wait and things get worse, it will be too late."