Formula 1 will move to yet another new qualifying system next year. This system however will be completely different to the existing system. Despite minor tweaking to the one lap format that was used since 2003, it has been a failure and the FIA have admitted that. The proposed new format however has a glaring loophole, which was surprisingly overlooked when the new rules were first made public.

In the new system, the session is split into 3 parts. The first 2 sessions, lasting 15 minutes are run on bare minimum fuel, a throwback to the free for all qualifying pre-2003. In the first session the bottom 6 runners are eliminated, and they occupy the bottom 6 slots of the 22 car grid, in order of their times. In the second session 6 more runners are eliminated in a similar manner and they occupy slots 11-16 of the grid. One notable difference is there is no lap limit like the 12 lap limit that existed in the old format.

Things however get interesting and slightly tricky in the last session. The remaining 10 runners are expected, at this point to decide the fuel loads they will use for the race on Sunday. The 10 cars are then fuelled up to those loads, and this load is checked by the FIA. After this, the session follows the same format of trying to get the fastest time possible. The race fuel load is expected to force the runners to try and do as many laps as possible before coming in for a new set of tyres and do one or two flying laps towards the end of the session. The tyre changes are again possible due to the return of tyre changes this year. At the end of the session the ten cars are fuelled back up to the load with which they started the final session. The other 12 cars are free to choose their fuel loads.

The problem is that the teams may be tempted to use let us say slightly dubious means to try and burn as much fuel as possible. This may involve the burning of an extremely rich mixture of fuel, trying to do laps in lower gears at high revs (though this would hardly be benign on the engine) or indeed sending fuel directly to the exhaust, giving us the rather interesting spectacle of flame spouting cars. There have been other rumoured solutions, but Max Mosley in a recent interview has proposed what will probably be the final solution to the problem. He says that the teams will be told how much fuel they can put in at the end per lap that they do in the final session. Which means that if the teams burn off excess fuel in search of a higher qualifying position they may have to start the race with a lower fuel load than what they started the final session with.
 
This seems like a fairly practical solution and we are unlikely to see any more changes before the first race. As Max himself admits, this may produce unintended consequences and we will only find out when the season starts. The frenzied, busy new system however should be better especially for trackside viewers, who had to wait a few minutes for the next car to come around in the 2005 system.

As a further caveat, the FIA have said that they will introduce the 110% rule. This is to prevent runners from running extremely slowly to expend more fuel since the refuelling will be done on a per lap basis. Under this rule, in the final session the runners will have to have all their laps within 110% of the time taken for their fastest lap. Any laps not within this time will mean that the cars will not be refuelled for that particular lap. Another implication of this is that if a driver spins on a lap, and exceeds the 110% limit, he may slightly compromise his own race strategy. We can only hope that this increasingly convoluted system leads to some absorbing action on the track.

Discuss this article and much more with Abeer Mahendroo [Nick: cavallino] at the World Racing Forum!

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