Why curtailed Eifel GP won't level F1, but will harm race for perfection

The sun actually shone at the Nurburgring on Friday. It was a glorious golden glow, lighting up a near cloudless blue sky.

The trouble was, this picturesque scene emerged nearly three hours after FP2 had been called off, curtailing the inaugural Eifel Grand Prix and meaning no Formula 1 track action took place today.

All told, it was a frustrating day - particularly for the fans allowed into the venue, only the third time that has been permitted in 2020.

The reason why this depressing non-spectacle took place was sound. The FIA's International Sporting Code requires the medical helicopter at every circuit F1 visits to be able to reach its designated receiving hospital within 20 minutes of departing the track in the event of casualty transfer. If circumstances mean this has to be done by an ambulance on the road, the 20-minute limit still remains.

The cold, wet drizzle was deposited by blanket of cloud that persisted throughout the bits of the day that were important for F1 track action. Although the broadcast helicopter was able to fly - as it does not need to leave the vicinity of the circuit - the fog meant the medical equivalent could not safely reach its destination. As the hospital is also unreachable in that 20-minute window by road from the Nurburgring, the sessions could not ever get started. It was a long, damp, slog.

The forecast for the rest of the weekend, particularly on Saturday, is much better - although it will remain cold, and the mercury is apparently set to plummet further on Sunday. But in any case, it is hoped that Friday's washout can be avoided as the FIA is set to update its contingency plan. Now, Autosport understands, a casualty would be driven approximately 3km downhill away from the track and then flown the rest of the way to hospital - all of which can be completed within the 20-minute window.

What the contingency plan doesn't do (at least at the time of writing) is give the teams back any of the 180-minutes of track action they missed, to the mist, today.

In recent years, as the to-and-fro battle over F1's sporting soul (the dreaded 'spectacle') has persisted, an argument has developed that suggests removing the Friday practice sessions entirely by design, and letting the teams crack on. This would mean a much reduced chance to understand everything they typically do ahead of qualifying and the race and therefore shake-up the competitive order.

But that suggestion doesn't work in isolation.

For the rest of this weekend, every team will have the same amount of time (the usual one-hour FP3 session) left to practice, and the same amount of tyre sets available. In fact, they will get an extra set of dry tyres - three instead of two - to help them make up ground in FP3.

"We need to be really efficient in practice three because the plan has completely changed. We need to really make the most out of it, to get the information we need on both the short and long runs" Valtteri Bottas

Of course, their car designs remain the same as they have been for the rest of 2020, and each squad has the same resources to crunch through the data they gather in FP3. As a result, Mercedes' advantage over the competition has not disappeared along with FP1 and FP2 at the Eifel GP.

But what this does mean is that the teams are now going to have to work through a packed schedule in FP3 to get all the data they can before going racing at a track where they haven't competed since 2013 - four years before the bigger cars were introduced (and during the previous engine-rules era), and on Sunday it's set to be colder than at any stage in 2020 winter testing - back in the pre-COVID lifetime.

Pirelli even says that "cold weather below 10-degrees centigrade ambient can potentially cause 'cold cracks' in the tyres, which means that they need to be carefully looked after while being fitted in the fitting area and then stored by the teams".

The cold weather also means it will take longer for the track to dry, which, if a shower strikes in FP3, would further reduce the window available for the teams to learn how their machines stack up on a track that is familiar, but not one where they have easy access to representative information on the latest designs.

Pirelli has brought its C2, C3 and C4 tyres to this race, which it has done to cover a variety of circumstances (although these of course need the cars to actually be running to matter!). The 3.19-mile track has a wide range of corners - from tight turns, to fast flowing sections, a tight and technical final chicane and a long hairpin that will strain the left-fronts. But the data from back before the Nurburgring dropped off the calendar suggests the course won't be all that demanding on the rubber.

The weather is set to have an impact whatever happens from now on - even if the sessions are not impacted by any unforeseen circumstances. Further rain between the remaining sessions would wash away the rubber that has been laid down, increasing the chances of mistakes on a newly 'green' track, and the teams only have four sets of intermediates and three sets of full wets to play with.

"We need to be really efficient in practice three because the plan has completely changed," said Valtteri Bottas. "We need to really make the most out of it, to get the information we need on both the short and long runs. It's a good challenge for both us as a team, and also us drivers because we need to be really quick and efficient on picking up details. It will make the weekend very exciting."

The teams will also be having to do the usual set-up and analysis work in a much shorter timeframe.

"We had a very busy Friday planned with many test items to understand what the optimum setup would be and also how to get the tyres to work in the expected very cold conditions," said AlphaTauri's chief race engineer, Jonathan Eddolls.

"The temperatures this weekend are colder than we experienced throughout the whole of winter testing, so there is doubt over all of the learnings we have built up over the season on how to extract the most from them. We have our beliefs on how the tyres will behave, based on science and engineering, but we needed to put those into practice to confirm."

But what the condensed schedule really means for the sessions that matter in the Eifel GP, is that there will be an increased chance of drivers making mistakes.

They won't be as 'at one' with the track as they would have been had the planned practice running taken place and the weather could also yet wash away the understanding the do get in practice. In such circumstances, things can go awry. The drivers will also need to be careful not to waste their precious wet weather tyres.

In terms of mistakes being costly, such a scenario happened last time out in Russia. One slip off the road from Lewis Hamilton in Q2, after he'd had a full set of practice sessions, and it all unravelled for the world champion, with Bottas going on to take victory - which was on the card's even before Hamilton's practice start penalties were applied.

Ultimately, in F1 the teams all want to be perfect all of the time: get pole, win the race, take the fastest lap bonus point.

This is the perfect plan for each squad, but the Nurburgring's new condensed schedule, which has stolen Imola's thunder, will decrease the likelihood that any one of them can definitely pull it off smoothly.