I’m delighted to see that the FIA has now confirmed that qualifying will go back to the 2015 format. It was the only sensible thing to do. Some are reporting this as being a victory for the F1 teams, but that’s not what it was. It was a victory for good sense and for the sport. I don’t see any reason why the federation and the Formula One group would back off in the face of the teams, but rather I think that they realised that to go on messing about with qualifying was damaging the sports relationship with the fans. And fans are important, if you stop and think about it. They are F1’s biggest asset.
Credibility is important to a governing bodies and I see this decision as recognition that the time was right to compromise. Losing more credibility will help neither the FIA nor FOM. Credibility is power.
If it was just a fight with the teams I see no reason why they would have backed down. This was bigger than that…
joeblogsf1 
Good news, indeed. My optimistic side wants to believe that Bernie and Jean just came to their senses and acted in good faith “for the good of the championship” as they stated. But their credibility in my book is so low at this point that I can’t help but think that they wouldn’t give in to the teams without some frightful ulterior motive.
But for now at least, a welcome sigh of relief for Sat. afternoons this season. I’ll take it!
Totd is a man that knows when a battle cannot be won.
“qualifying returns to 2015 format”.
There was a message on FERRARI twitter account which read “unity is the only way to overcome difficulties”.
That’s pretty ironic coming from Ferrari, considering the recent use of their self serving veto power.
Not where I went with that Twitter.
I interpreted it to mean that ‘unity is the only way to maximise the profit to Ferrari for being the first to sell everyone else down the river on the new Concorde Agreement’…
In fairness to Arrivebene, perhaps he’s ignorant of Ferari’s dedicated work at sabotaging team unity before his arrival in post.
The cynical side of me would say that this is just a bone thrown to the masses in order to appear that FIA/FOM really care about the fans; a group for which they seem to have little regard. It didn’t cost them anything in the way of infrastructure. Their new concept was a solution to a problem that didn’t exist in the first place. Our F-1 race commentators pointed that out during the Melbourne quali broadcast. Steve Machette said: “Of all the problems in F-1 today, why did they mess with the one thing that was actually working?”
Have you heard the result of the BRDC meeting?
Sent from my iPad
>
I’m so pleased with news, some sanity at last.
The correct decision.
I understand why they changed it and I think it was worth a try but the reality is it didn’t work so it was the only sensible choice.
If the fans have finally been listened to, this is probably the first and last time this has happened. But… how about sticking it to to Bernie and Napoleon regarding the ridiculous payments inequality between Ferrari and Manor.
By the way, I had to laugh when I heard Bernie like to think of Ferrari as the Rolling Stones of F1. Us old farts will remember Allen Klein and what he did to the Stones and the Beatles.
April delight ….well we were one step from qualifying from a hat……Mad Hatters F1 tea party…all invited…by invitation….
Great news, what a relief too! Can’t wait to see the qualif in China, with Haas and Manor so competitive, q1 and q2 will be very interesting.
FINALLY some common sense. Hallelujah!
Never try to fix what is not broken is something that they should have had in mind in the first place.
That being said, the season is off to a great start with two terrific races and especially the success of Haas F1
One sensible decision which never should have to made to begin with.
The ironic thing is that had F1 had tyres which were consistent for several laps and weren’t designed to progressively lose performance after only a couple of laps then elimination qualifying could have worked.
The fact that they tried it with these tyres shows that they really didn’t think it through at all.
It basically looks like they don’t know what they want F1 to be.
“Fans are F1’s biggest asset?” I thought Bernie was F1’s biggest ass….et.
So now we’re back to empty tracks for 90% of each qualifying section, Mercedes front rows guaranteed and up to four cars of the final top ten not even bothering to set a time to save tyres. What a joke.
You think the alternative was better?
For me the 2015 qualifying and the 2016 alternative were about the same in entertainment value.
However, with some minor tweeks (for example: 1. shorten elimination intervals to 60 sec; 2. no refueling during qualy; 3. Instead of returning 2 sets of tyres after P3, return those after qualy) the 2016 alternative could have been much better.
Hi Tom, what did you smoke?
Exactly, Tom has a large cache of hemp he put a match too if he thinks a shorter interval would improve things. 90 seconds was not enough time to mount a quali lap, so why would 60 seconds work?!
Joe “This was bigger than that…” You have to explain that comment. The fans are bigger than Bernie and FIA? The battle was more than met the eye? I still think that the threat of loosing live quali from the TV companies had an effect on the outcome. They have more weight than the fans I am afraid. That and Todt did not want to go down with Bernie, he showed support for Bernie in Bahrain and then decided that was enough!
Yes, the fans are bigger than these people and they need to be reminded of that sometimes. The fans make or break a sport.
As much as I would love to believe those in charge share that sentiment, based on their track record there is nothing to suggest they listen to what the followers of the competition want or desire.
Adam:
@1. If you shorten the intervals, it means there will be more time before the first elimination. Those extra 3 minutes mean that every driver has enough time to do a lap, make a pitstop and do another lap before elimination starts.
@2. The refueling ban makes pit stops much shorter, so there is more time to plan your strategy. And every lap you do, will theorically be quicker. So if you fuel the car for 2 runs per session (in case of a misstake), you really want to do 2 runs, or you will be too slow at the end.
@3. More tyres available for qualy, but not for the race: no need to save them.
I think the teams should be blamed too for making elimination qualifying a bit tame. For example Q2 in Bahrain. Towards the end Hulkenberg and the Toro Rosso’s could still get into Q3. Only HUL did a run. That means only P8 (Grosjean) could still be dropped, all the others were safe. If the Toro Rosso’s had run, then all the others (maybe except Mercs and Ferrari) were forced to do another lap.
Toro Rosso (and Grosjean) didn’t run, because they wanted to save a set of tyres. But no one had to run, so they didn’t save anything compared to drivers who were already ahead of them. You can blame the rules, but you can just as easily call the teams ‘overly conservative’ (to phrase it nicely).
i think You Tom are too much trunk-down on this one. In normal circumstances Merc are 1-2 in qualy at any given format anyway whatsoever. Swing your attention to races please. Or – if, say if Werhlain can’t get a pole will you down-like a fun that RIC, VES, SAI, PER, GRO etc do with overtaking ? If Lewis can’t overtake that’s his problem, other lads CAN!
I like the concept of elimination qualifying. It was just poorly executed by everyone. If Pirelli had been charged with providing qualifying only tyres to the team which were then discarded it would have worked. People seem to have very short memories that 90% of the qualifying hours for the last ten years have been utterly soporific and predictable.
I don’t agree.
From the point that I started watching qualifying, and knowing what I was watching, it was the 2015 format, and I always found it a good watch, especially in the year that Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, and Sebastien Vettel had the machinery to consistently vy for pole positions.
The elimination template looked wrong from the moment that it decided that Quali Three would be down to the last two drivers, not the last three drivers.
With a tyre that can last longer than a lap, it might have worked, but without so robust a set of boots, returning to the template where the bloke with the chequered flag can wave at CARS rather than tarmac, is the way to go.
For me, anyway.
All the drivers in the top ten set a time. They are given a free set of tyres specifically so they do. Prior to giving them that extra set teams didn’t want to waste tyres so wouldn’t send drivers out in Q3, but since then they always do, they have no reason not to.
/ we’re back to empty tracks for 90% of each qualifying section/
Sorry for you not to have watched F1 qualifying since 2004.
And please remind us how many cars were there on track in the second half of Q1 and Q2 in Bahrain?
Yes, I’m thinking that too. Would Q3 have been different under 2015 rules? I’m not sure. If Q3 at China goes on like the previous two races with everybody looking to save tyres rather than try a run that probably won’t gain them a grid spot then there’ll be some explaining to do – though not by Todt or Ecclestone.
“… damaging the sports relationship with the fans. And fans are important …” Fans who are prepared to pay premium prices higher than I can afford are important.
“If it was just a fight with the teams I see no reason why they would have backed down. This was bigger than that…”
Then what was it? What is going on in the background that we’re not seeing here?
The fans, the media etc
Whatever else may have influenced BCE more than the smell of money,
I can’t imagine that FOM would enjoy the prospect of a conflict with either
or both Scuderia Ferrari and Mercedes Benz over a qualifying system
clearly dreamed up by a geeky teenager with acne. They knew they were on a hiding to nothing. ‘Quit while you are still ( just !) ahead’, is a good maxim.
That would be a change in approach given the contempt the fans have been treated with to date.
Given that I can be a bit thick, will you please explain all this in small words I can understand?
I think it was a victory for the teams. FIA realised that they were never going to vote for their stupid options so it was either have rubbish qualy all season or back down and give them the 2015 option.
I think it was a victory for commonsense
Same thing in this instance.
I don’t think this is the end of it though. They will want revenge!
Totally agreeable assessment.
The polemics of power-play between FIA, FOM and the Teams eventully “fell by the wayside”, as it became ever clearer to FIA that the Sport was coming into worldwide disrepute, and irreparable damage to the sports “stocks in credibility’ was inevitable if the fiasco on qualifying shenanigans went any further.
As a long time F1 Fan, sinking into some recent disillusionment… Hallelujah.
A theory from the arm-chair… Bernie & Todt knew how rubbish the system was from the start and were willing to take the pain of backing down from it.
They knew it would push the teams to work together, giving FIA/Bernie & co the chance to show the EU investigators that the teams have some power in the sport…
It would be better to take some minor heat for poor tweaks to the show rather than have the walls torn down by a commission.
The fans are F1’s only asset!
You clearly haven’t met any of the guys and gals who work night and day
without a break all year long for the race teams they love and would damn near die for ! These people define what real dedication is all about.
And what they produce for us lucky people to enjoy week after week after month is possibly the most magnificent spectacle this planet has to offer !
To us really dedicated fans, F1’s drivers, engineers, team managers,
and the terrific spectacle they produce for us all season long…..well lets
put it politely and just say that these marvellous people deserve vastly better than the ordure FOM/CVC and FIA serve up to them most of the time.
Lions lead by donkeys !
Yes, but who pays the bills? The Fans. Why do sponsors and t.v companies put money in? to buy fan eye balls and start the trail of consumption in our good old marketing economy.
No fans equals no money, these arrogant F**ks – FOM (Bernie stuck in the 80’s decade Ecclestone & his cvc henchman) and the insulated FIA – Jean Crystal chandelier ballrooms & Champagne Todt – These self important Ivory tower prats are nauseating and have lost the plot, keep tuning out people and let our absent money force some accountability. Greed is good, they’ll start turning on one another when the money dries up.
all that jazz?……..
Didn’t Chris Barber play at The Octagon a couple of times? He now does an occasional guest spot with the Bob Webb All Stars at “the worlds first purpose built motor racing circuit”.
That’s a bit of good news. It’s a small thing that cost FOM nothing financially. They messed with something that didn’t need fixing while elsewhere the roof is falling in.
What needs fixing is the lack of close racing. Piquet drove a car designed with no front wing that led him to a world championship. No front wing, no punctures, no “Nico’s hit me!” The front wings are just ridiculously large for racing with other people on the track. Even Lewis agrees- less aero, more mechanical.He, and the other drivers, should know, as they are the ones in the cars. As soon as Bernie stepped out of a racing car for the last time, the money signs seem to be what has lead him.
The thing is, I think they will have difficulty defining regulations that change that status quo. Red Bull proved that to win, you design a car to get pole and run off, not chase down and pass other cars.
The only way to get F1 teams to design cars that can closely follow each other is to have a format at some point over the weekend (IE not the main race) where the grid is set in reverse championship order, whether that be a race to determine main grid start or a half points no pits sprint race, then tell them they must use the same aero all weekend. Then Red Bull et al will start to design cars that can follow each other within 1/10 second and built to overtake rather than struggling for performance when they get within 2 secs.
Being openly mocked by leading drivers and team bosses plus most news outlets had at least some effect, then. But if reading this blog has taught me anything it’s that nothing is as simple as it first seems with F1.
Some common sense.
But if it was not a battle with the teams, what was the purpose of all this?
Sincerely think about improving the races?
“This was bigger than that…! ”
Well this was just the warm up, the next big fight is over the 2017 Tech regs. The current proposals give a large extra amount of downforce with wider floors wider wings and wider bodies, plus diffusers that will start forward of the rear axle. Gigantic barge-boards. The spec also includes wider tyres. BUT what we really want is less downforce and wider tyres, less upwash from the diffuser, less of the huge vortexes off the rear wings. Then cars could follow closely and slipstream without loosing traction on the front and damaging their tyres, so we could have old fashioned overtaking.
Remember 1992 Senna.with Mansell two centimetres behind him around Monaco, for lap after lap, that could not happen today. Ok Mansell never got past but on a different track he would have, because of the laws of slipstream, something we never see in F1 nowadays. (but partially faked by the DRS system)
How about single element wings front and rear, and no other appendages (i.e. bargeboards and vanes under the nose)?
No, it would be like a junior formula then.
/Remember 1992 Senna.with Mansell two centimetres behind him around Monaco, for lap after lap, that could not happen today/
Unforgettable, but you seem to have forgotten that it was mainly due to Williams’ technical advantage comparable or exceeding Mercedes’ advantage of last seasons (and some Mansell’s bad luck,of course).
Some sense. However i wonder when the reprisals will begin !!
Really good news. Common sense prevails and I hope that the FIA/FOM/F1 Commission learn from the mistakes of their meddling. If they do then that can only be a good thing and we can all move on from this and chalk it down to (a bad and unnecessary) experience.
Joe – are you concerned what price BCE and Todt will have extracted for backing down in this?
There is no prive
So neither of those two got anything in return?
“He’s counting your guns. Testing your firing power with the lives of his warriors.”
I think there was. Bernie wants the current engines gone at all cost. When did Vettel give his recent interview about wanting to go back to normally-aspirated engines?
Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
So glad the teams revolted against the crazy F1 duo “Hinge & Bracket” aka “Eccs & Todt”!!
I hope the FIA (or as it’s commonly known)
“Farce In Action” uphold the teams desire to revert back to 2015 Qualifying.
So Napoleon Complex duo have to eat humble pie for a change. Let’s hope the grip on F1 will slowly dwindle & the go off to retirement & as you say Joe, Todt can go off & carry on painting his Zebra crossings in Uganda!!
Or places where tumbleweed can benefit from them!!
Did Ferrari really tweet – “Unity is the only way to overcome difficulties” ?
They really did.
Shameless? Stupid? Possessed of remarkably short memories? Who knows.
Did I miss any possibilities?
It seems to me that the only way to mix up the grid is to do so artificially. Qualifying as a concept will always put the quickest cars at the front.
The current farce was just an attempt to trip someone up so they got run out by the clock, not really what the sport is about.
Rather than changing Saturday they should change Sunday, your final position in the race comes with a small time penalty to be added to your qualifying time at the next race on a sliding scale.
Based on Bahrain Nico gets 0.6 of a second added to his China time, Kimi 0.5 seconds, Lewis 0.4 seconds etc. The drivers still have the incentive to push in both the race and the following qualifying (a run at the right time with the right tires may overcome the penalty).
This would pretty much hand pole to Vettel in China and gives him a chance to close up the championship race after a costly DNF plus gives teams like Williams and Red Bull the chance to start ahead of the Mercedes. Maybe the time penalty is only added to the top six to protect a smaller team who has a blinding Sunday from being punted to the back at the next race.
Surely it either has to be the pure qualifying concept as it has been for a while or a fully implemented artificial method. Any “compromise” like we have just seen won’t mix up the grid and will ruin the show.
JT did say the promoters (guess that means the circuit owners as the official prompter doesn’t believe that’s his remit) wanted to improve Saturdays, but JT’s knee jerk solution resulted in an empty track in the last 5 minutes of each section.
So I wonder if ticket sales for Saturdays had any effect on the decision here?
[It did for me. I’ve just bought weekend Turn 12 tickets for the Austin GP and planned to go to the track just Friday and Sunday and visit Houston Space Center on Saturday rather than endure this qualifying format. Now I’m thinking of going to Houston on a different day]
JT and BCE could never win this arm-wrestle as it needed all 12 teams to pull in one direction (very unlikely) and all the teams had to do to embarrass FIA/FOM at every race was to follow the qualifying rules.
“Unity is the only way to overcome difficulties” Nice Ferrari remembers (better late than never) how they won the battle of ´81-82 as Ecclestone allied with FISA president Balestre, seemingly paradox at that time, Then as now, the car manufacturers with their turbo engines were the bad ones, because they dared to question Ecclestones leadership of Formula 1.
Familiar???
1982 Today
Ecclestone/Balestre Ecclestone/Todt
FISA-FOCA Manufacturer Teams-Red Bull/Ecclestone
Stir up trouble to break ditto
manufacturers power
and box through new
regulations
6cm ground clearance, sound discussion, 2017 regs (or not), qualifying
water tanks, Imola 82.. mess
In both cases, the damage of the sport obviously was accepted tacitly.
But the turning point in 1982 came, just days before the Imola race, when Ferrari organized a press conference at Molino Rosso with all turbo teams PLUS some FOCA teams and the future contenders Honda and Porsche about the bad governance of the sport. That was it, the Imola race took place and the Turbos remained in F1. Ecclestone was second. It just happened because all were unanimous.
Unbelievable, more or less the same scenarios after decades. But it´s getting fatiguing. Even the most benevolent F1 people should know that a promoter of a F1 WC who acts in a way like Ecclestone has in the last two years cannot be accepted anymore.
I guess I could be classed as a fan as I have watched pretty much every race and qualifying since 1994! I watched Melbourne qualifying and as soon as I heard they were doing the same format as Melbourne I didn’t bother watching Bahrain qualifying because I had better things to do (watching paint dry!).
At least it’ll be back to normal for China, although I don’t think I’ll bother watching qualifying because it’s only live on Sky! Whereas I was paying NowTV £10.99 to watch qualifying and the race I’m going to save my money and just shell out £6.99 to watch the race live. PayTV is ultimately going to be F1s downfall, being a so called fan I guess means that my views are relatively unimportant especially as I don’t own a Rolex or drive a Bentley! Bernie loves himself so much he even gets graphics overlayed on the track at the start of the GP saying “Bernie says…” where most fans don’t give a **** what he says.
Joe – this might seem like a tangent, although it speaks to the wider issue of failing to get to grips with F1’s ills that the qualifying mess is just typical of – why isn’t the lack of ground effect downforce universally seen as the big fix F1 needs?
The drivers, the fans, some engineers, knowledgeable press people like Hughes and yourself, uncle Tom Cobbly etc all say it is a silver bullet. Yet we very rarely hear about the need for it from BCE, Ron, Sergio, Todt and company. Why is this?
When it *is* looked at, such as for 2017, it is never really fully implemented. I know the GE cars of old were dangerous, and we had those Indy flips recently. In your view is the unwillingness down to fear of going down an expensive path that could be deadly, or is it more likely everyone is having way too much ‘fun’ arguing about everything else under the sun?
I have never said it is the right thing to do. I don’t think it is. F1 needs to lose downforce not create it
It isn’t so much about the levels of downforce, I agree there is too much, it is about wake from the wings. What downforce there is should be generated from below the car, with the exterior wings even simpler than what is being mooted for 2017.
Yet no matter how many times we hear about cars unable to follow each other, no matter how many things like DRS or multiple tyre compounds are employed to hide this, it never seems to be priority #1, or even close.
Why is that?
Well said, Joe. This is about pragmatism and the sport, not about loss of face. That said, it’s clear that qualifying has to change and will change. We hear this pressure comes from the promoters. How come the fans and the promoters see things so differently, or is their a misunderstanding over F1’s audience?
I am glad they finally came to their senses. If they continued with some sort of ridiculous qualifying system it would be the first qualifying I refused to watch in almost 10 years.
I just don’t understand why they thought the 2015 system needing tinkering with? the system works well, the problem is how far ahead of everyone else Mercedes is
well at last..what a mess that was!!
Anyhoo: for what it’s worth (for Bernie and Jean with love), here’s my idea on the 2017 qualifying: Bernie wants reverse grids and the Jean’s system and current tyres require one-lap runs (and the new system reminded me of the time that we had one-lap runs), so:
Qualifying is a set of one-lap qualy specials. For qualifying only, they run in reverse order of the previous races’ results. Maybe 2 sessions: the first “reverse” one determining the top 10, then taking the top 10 from Q1 for a “reverse” shootout Q2 (keeping the order that they had to start with to avoid tactical slowness).
This preserves the purist view that fastest should be first, but narrows the gaps and potentially turns them around in a few cases to “mix up the grid”.
This probably mixes up the grids becuase
a) running in reverse order means the quickest person should (usually) have a less-preferable track (so more likely that a later run beats the previously faster chap).
b) there might be rain/other environmental conditions
c) crashes might cause issues (not sure how red flags were dealt with previously but it’s been done before, so use the same rules)
Good things for the sport/TV:
c) Each car/driver gets guaranteed telly time
d) Every session is chock-full of action (no down time on TV and we see every corner of every run: they could manage the time for minimum TV-downtime by overlaying a couple of runs so that the next one started straight after a previous one)
..or we could just leave it as it is again! 🙂