Back to quali:

The fuel load thing is rubbish, as we all know, more or less. It kind of made some semblance of sense when it was brought in (with the the hateful single-lap quali). There was a choice to be made, either running very light for track position or running very heavy and cashing in on race day. But things like the "field spread" (Brundle is always going on about it) and the aforementioned aero passing problems render it a bit pointless as all the teams more or less gravitate to the same time for stopping, plus/minus 1-2 laps at most. I really don’t get the "write the fuel load in an envelope before Q3 starts" school of thought. It just seems unneccessary (though god knows F1 loves unneccessary). You might as well run it on empty tanks. Being 11th and being allowed to pick your fuel on the day was only a (small) advantage for a few races anyway. I don’t know what the official FIA line is on WHY they actually have to qualify on race fuel, because the reasons they might have started doing it no longer apply these days.
 
The old 1 hour, 12 lap format was good, but too few laps for too much time. An in-out-hot run takes around 6 minutes, roughly, times 4 is 24 minutes, for a 62 minute session (given the final run was generally being made after the flag was out) - no wonder there was so much dead time. If you want that format back, give them more laps and then there’s less sitting around waiting. In 1996 they could do as many laps as they wanted.

Me personally, I’d adopt a similar style of Moto GP’s quali. An hour, unlimited laps, but with a few sets of qualifying tyres for the end. I like that because being superquick on a quali tyre does not mean you have a great race setup and there’s no certainty by any means that pole sitter=race winner. By all means make quali about being the fastest driver/car package over one pure hot lap, but do it in a way that’s a bit different to race day, to give more variety and possibilities for things to change.

I think the realism of the matter is to consider that there is no way for a qualification system to fairly order the cars from fastest to slowest: that is what the race is for. As we see from week to week, the race doesn’t do that good a job of ordering the cars, either.

qualis on fumes!

i would possibly add an additional tweak: the top three have an additional chance to improve  on their q3 time in a q4 single-lap shoot-out in direct order (1 to 3).
so we really get the first three to push and enjoy their laps fully

I loved the 1 lap qualy from 2003-2005. As you could watch the entire lap of each driver. Sometimes even onboard, and you would ALWAYS watch the pole lap. Okey, it had it’s problems, but it was the best format for me.

I do not know what’s wrong, I have this problem since the new design here … I used "enter" to forcibly break the lines, I tried to see what happens if I don’t … Well, I went off the track

My favourite qualifying memories go back to watching onboard footage of Senna. That was without the semi automatic gearbox too. It was always fantastic to watch and a real highlight of the GP weekends. Otherwise when else do we see a driver with fresh tyres and low fuel pushing for that ultimate lap? We don’t. We see drivers getting a good enough time to get into the top 10, but it’s not the same. How do we know they really are going for it?

I don’t know, I think we should not complain too much when FIA actually listens and tries to improve things. It may take few more tweaks before the current system is perfectly fine, but why not ? Would it be better if they change it for something totally new ? Or do we really want the old 12 lap system and  then wait for 50 minutes till we see first Ferrari or McLaren on track ?