Following this weeks meeting in London, it has been leaked the F1 stakeholders have agreed to trial a new qualifying format in 2023. It’s unclear whether this proposal has the agreement of the FIA who blocked the increase in Sprint races from 3 to 6 for next year.
The current qualifying system for F1 has been in place since 2006 though the regulations briefly changed in 2016 where every 90 seconds the slowest car was eliminated.
Then the new format was supposed to introduce more jeopardy into qualifying. Instead at the Australian season opener, curtailed Q1/2/3 sessions and led to an anti-climax in Q3.
Hamilton clinched pole with four minutes of the session remaining, while the Ferraris of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen – Mercedes’ closest competitors at the time sat in the garage watching on.
After the second round in Bahrain, this format was dropped and the sport returned to the one in existence today.
At two as yet unnamed events next year, another quali format will be tried.
The teams will be forced to run the hard tyres in Q1, the medium in Q2 and the soft in Q3.
Further, the tyre allocation will be reduced as three sets of soft will be removed but the teams will receive one extra set of the Hard and medium tyres.
TJ13 believes a further discussion also took place about introducing the mandatory use of all three tyre compounds during the race, in effect forcing each GP to become a two stop race.
This again introduces jeopardy and given different teams run better on different compounds the eb and flow of the race may well change more frequently than at present
it could give an interesting twist in quali if you have to drive hard – medium – soft. However, this will mainly have consequences in the rear part of the grid.
The mandatory two-stop because you have to use all compounds, I say just do it.
Let’s re-introduce fueling than too. That will really make the race interesting. Teams starting on hard with low fuel vs softs with high fuel…