motorsportmania

News that there is to be a shake up of qualifying is overdue, but how radical will it really be?If the aim is to stop Q3 teams failing to complete a competitive lap then the easy option is to say that your grid position will be determined by the sum of your best lap in each session divided by the number of sessions you were involved in. Any team not going for a decent lap in Q3 would then find themselves back behind the Q2 runners at least which might stir them up a bit.

NASCAR, who are more concerned about the show biz than the sport have just scrapped their old one at a time qualifying for a free for all like we used to enjoy in F1, but we don’t see much chance of F1 going back to that even if the three session format really doesn’t throw up too much in the way of surprise. Sure we get the odd front runner fail to make the top 10, but not really often enough to make much of a difference and the format, for us, does not generate a lot of excitement; we all know that Seb is brilliant at the last ditch one lap blitz.

Maybe what we really need is the equivalent of the old “keys in the middle” random draw so that you get to qualify in what you’ve picked and then you race your own car from whatever position you gain from that: Let’s see how far up the grid Seb can get a Marussia 😉

Back in the land of reality the problem is that every rule allows people to be creative and use it in a way that will produce an unintended result and the more rules you have the more opportunity there is to screw the system. Something like the suggestion we made at the top means that drivers need to give it their best shot in each session that they compete in; if they had done that from the start…

Filed under: F1 | Tagged: autoracing, F1, formula one, motorsport, NASCAR, racecar |