To me the big difference came when the focus changed from “establish the grid order” to “maximise the entertainment and crowds on the Saturday”. The former is about the event and is relatively straightforward to do, the latter is only tangentially about the race, and requires a lot more fiddling to be fair, meaningful, and a good show.

Sorry to broaden the discussion, but the shift seems to me to be symptomatic of a wider shift in society. F1’s qualifying fiddling is about improving the show to bring in more fans, however not all things can appeal to all people. Football doesn’t do well in the US, and I’ve always felt a part of the reason is that US sporting culture needs things constantly happening – scoring in basketball, constant downs in American football etc, whereas football has long periods of pressure waves, probing, passes – it doesn’t fit. Fortunately football has a large enough worldwide appeal it doesn’t need new boots and panties to pander to the US audience, but F1 is not like that, and is seeking to change and expand. As far as existing fans are concerned, it’s not always for the better.

Personally I rather like the new system, however for me at least it fails in what it sets out to do in that I don’t watch it all the way through – why watch the 12 slowest being eliminated, then the 10 fastest circulating for 10 minutes? I tune in for the last 10 minutes or so and watch the meaningful part. What I like about it is that the compromises each driver introduces have an effect on the race. It carries a level of strategy and intrigue. Most complaints are that there is no flat-out one lap, but we get that more or less in Q2. Anyway the old one lap would be compromised now by engine life, no tire competition etc. For me one-lap will mean Senna with one set of super-stickies left, sitting in the garage with three or four minutes left looking for a gap in the traffic to nail a one off banzai effort. Now that I would tune in for!

I think the ideal qualifying format would be a session where the cars are lined up in the pit and sent out one by one by a steward, not with cars alone on the track, but after the first car is sent out, the next car waits until the first car reaches sector two or three depending on the length of the track, and so on until all cars are out and have gone for their allotted time or lap distance. (Three laps- exit lap, hot lap, and cool-down lap should do just fine.) The order can be determined in the same way it was for the one-lap format.

If a one-lap on-your-own format is reintroduced, I hope that there can still be an “elimination” concept so that one bad lap can ruin your grid position, but in order to earn pole, you must have three good ones. Better yet, how about having the top eight or ten hot laps put in a sprint race for pole? Would that take too long with the expected number of cars next year?

Despite the criticism, I indeed find the qualifying sessions more interesting than the race itself on most weekends this year.

(Just out of curiosity, how many times has David Coulthard been the first one out on a Q session this year?)

The problem I see with bringing on the one-hour system is that F1 teams think they are exposing some secret if they put their car on the track too soon, so that in the end, most teams don’t have more than two cracks at a good lap anyway, so unless the time limit is turned down to about 5 minutes, I don’t see a good reason to use a timed format.

Good topic.

Being an old fogy, I would say: Let them have an hour to get the fastest time they can, no limits on fuel or tires (except that they must be race tyres, not qualifiers). Then those who have a minor problem with the car have time to sort it out, anyone overcooking it and landing in the gravel isn’t automatically excluded and everyone gets a fair crack.

Sure, it won’t be the great spectacle we seem to expect these days, but why must F1 always bow to the desires of the TV audience? Money? Oh yes, I was forgetting that…

I don’t think they need to decide on fuel until the morning of the race, I would rather it be a complete surprise rather than now where we pretty much know what is going to happen. Of course banning refuelling would be the ideal.

I would also like to a see a return of the within percentage rules so that some teams could fail to qualify and therefore would not even start.

It also made teams and drivers so cautious that they would either qualify at 9/10ths of their true pace (not what qualifying was for) or give up altogether (most sessions had at least one driver not bother to set a time). As a result, mix-ups were rare (I certainly don’t remember any that were not either weather or mechanically-related) and the sense I had that pole had been earned went away. Attaching the qualifying order to the previous race result, while preventing the occasional farce (Silverstone 2004 comes to mind), accentuated the “unearned” problem.

The real reason 12-lap quali was originally dropped was the long build-up. Even though I for one enjoyed the build-up, contracting the length of qualifying would have been a far superior solution to a method that was dull and rewarded conservatism over speed.

I also agree that we are seeing the teams, nearly all of them, leaving their Q1/Q2 runs ever later and so cramming more laps into the final moments. That problem was in part created by letting drivers finish laps aftr the chequered flag, and not like the original set-up where you had to have the time before the clock hit 0. It effectively increases each session to almost 17/18 minutes: again, far too long for a maximum of two runs of three laps.

Not sure what the ideal solution is. The current system is not bad, though Q3 is the weakest part which is ridiculous as it’s most important. It needs to be low fuel too. Maybe Q1/Q2 only need to be 10 or 12 minute long – 15 is too much.

milos — Good points. I can sympathise with the idea that it might be a bit boring if you are at the track.

As for point a), I disagree with the point about drivers being penalised for having a bad result. For one thing, this helped to mix the grid up a bit without resorting to Mickey Mouse methods. If a driver had an unfavourable quali run, it was because he deserved it. Plus, it creates another incentive for drivers to overtake during the race.

Watching qualifying at the moment, another problem with the current system has occurred to me. The random weight checks which can ruin a driver’s entire session. In one-lap qualifying they could just weigh each car after they’ve done their lap.

And we also saw the yellow flags problem in Q1, when Davidson went off on the track. For a long time at the end of the session (when it is most important) drivers were unable to improve on their S3 time because of the yellow flags.

The one lap in terms of being able to see everything. It was not as bad as many say. I did not like 2 things about that:

a) It took one hour from the first to the last driver to complete their flying laps. The track conditions were too different, the weather changed. Drivers with bad result in a race were penalized for the next race with unfavourable qualifying run.

b) It was OK on TV, but quite boring on the track during the race weekends. Watching cars one by one for 2 hours and at the same time having almost nobody out during free practice (because of the old rules) did not bring good value for the price of the ticket.

We already have multiple camera angles available for football, NFL and cricket, how hard would it be to make mutliple feeds available for selction from behind the red button or on the net?

Whilst covering every driver and every corner is a bit extreme, the viewer could perhaps choose from the following:

1. Usual TV Coverage
2. Most recent ‘fastest’ lap.
3. Laps from the big 4.
4. Onboard with driver of the day.
5. Fixed stream from an interesting part of the track.
6. Highlights

Broadcast it in HD, make it free and I’ll have a moon-on-a-stick please!