Quite a lot.
The new system sees the slowest car knocked out every 90 seconds in the second part of each of three sessions. The teams had warned everyone wince the changes were announced – just three weeks ago – that the new format would result in no cars on track at the end of the final session because people would save or run out of tyres. They are intelligent people and that perfectly sums up what happened.
The first session of qualifying worked well, I thought. There was excitement throughout and the TV showed exactly what was going on – a slight glitch meant that the countdown timer didn’t show for the first few eliminations and commentators on both Sky F1 and Channel 4 (I watched both) were confused.
Viewers were too, if Twitter and Facebook are anything to go by.
The lack of a satisfying climax to the session is probably the cause of much frustration.
Formula One is supposed to be exciting. Not watching drivers get weighed during the last few minutes of a session because there is no point to them driving around.
I don’t know how I’d fix it.
The sport needs a shake up, needs something to generate overtaking and mixed up grids. I do understand why the change was made, but it wasn’t a great alteration which just feels like a knee-jerk reaction to a problem no one wanted solving.
There was a pole sitter decided today, and that was Lewis Hamilton who has now become the third driver ever to achieve 50 or more poles – only Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna have more.
The grid for tomorrow looks like this (via the F1 Twitter feed):
FINAL PROVISIONAL QUALIFYING CLASSIFICATION*
*Rio Haryanto will start from P22 following a grid penalty#AusGP pic.twitter.com/JVseLkhaAr
— Formula 1 (@F1) March 19, 2016
I hope the race can make up for the disappointment of today.