F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali made some headlines this week by hinting at less practice time for Formula 1 in a weekend.
Although Domenicali has walked a bit back on some of his comments, he does still insist that it wouldn’t be wrong to entertain ideas.
The current standardized F1 weekend schedule begins on Thursday, with media work, the track walk, etc. On normal weekends, Friday marks the start of the on-track weekend with two free practice sessions, each an hour long. One more hour-long free practice session starts Saturday off, with qualifying afterwards.
In a sprint weekend, the second free practice session is replaced with qualifying on Friday, with qualifying’s Saturday slot being filled by the sprint race. The Saturday free practice session is retained, but there’s less point to it as cars are under parc ferme (in NASCAR terms, impounded) once they drive out on track for qualifying. So there are no major changes teams can make in that second free practice session.
“Obviously the more practice you do, the more up to speed you’ll be, the more comfortable you’ll be with the car,” George Russell said in the Thursday FIA press conference this week. “I don’t think it’s right that Formula 1 has three times the amount of practice that you have in the F3 and F2 categories. They should be the ones to get more practice, also because they’re doing less races, they don’t get to test that often.”
Currently, both F3 and F2 have a single 45-minute practice session followed up by a 30-minute qualifying session to determine their full grids. Both series have a sprint race on Saturday and a feature race on Sunday prior to the F1 grand prix. All weekends are companion events with F1, with F3 being at 10 F1 weekends this season and F2 at 14.
“Yeah, I agree with George,” Pierre Gasly followed up with in the same press conference. “Definitely. Three is not needed from a driving point of…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at …