subject to arcane interpretations and are heavily influenced by the feelings of the corporate sponsors involved in the race and the strong personalities involved on all sides. Sounds familiar, no? The analogy here is not just to the bizarre scoring used for a season of racing, but to the culture, corruption and personalities that tend to dominate the various forms whether it's NASCAR, F1 and almost everything in between.
It's almost an exact analogy to political elections. The regional contests that stack up wins/points for a certain team, leading to the big nationals where it's usually down to just two teams fighting it out for the few points that put them ahead to win the championship- the other mathematically out of the contest, etc. Even the inter-team bickering is represented - see Alonso and Hamilton's nasty in-fighting for a recent example that's very reminiscent of the Hillary/Obama situation.
Regarding dirty tricks, there's an old saying that arose from the dirt tracks where early moonshine runners turned into racers and it remains popular today : "There are only two kinds of racers, the cheaters and the losers". Political elections are referred to as races for a reason, and people tend to think of them that way, not like a football or golf game. Racing rules, along with the traditional disregard for them whenever favorable, tend to apply. This is much less true of golf and even football, where dirty play is not considered a admirable trait.
Here's an interesting bit of history from the Trans Am series that illustrates this...
This is further outlined in Mark's book "Unfair Advantage"..
During their enormous success in Trans-Am, Roger and Mark would begin to experiment with their Camaros, searching for that all-elusive Unfair Advantage. They discovered that dipping a car's frame in an acid bath would eat away small amounts of metal from the frame, which, in turn made the car incrementally lighter, and allowed it to be driven faster around the track. The 1967 Z-28 won its last race by lapping the entire field of cars, raising eyebrows throughout the paddock. During a post-race inspection, race stewards discovered that the car was 250 pounds lighter than the 2800 pound minimum weight requirement. Donohue was to have his race victory taken away for cheating. But, owing to his keen business sense, Roger Penske stepped in. Penske threatened that any disqualification could potentially lead to Chevrolet pulling all support for the Trans-Am series. After considering the options, the race stewards allowed Donohue's victory to stand, but the rules for the 1968 season incorporated a change where all cars will be weighed during the pre-race technical inspection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Donohue