F1 should scrap Friday practice

The first day of the 2015 Russian Grand Prix was summed up neatly by TV pictures of Felipe Massa at the wheel of his Williams, parked in the garage, eyes firmly closed as rain hammered the Sochi asphalt.

On days like these one feels sorry for Formula 1 fans, particularly those who have forked out good money (either on TV packages or grandstand tickets) to watch. Paint drying might be more appealing...

Rain washed out the second Friday practice session for the Russian GP completely, after an unfortunate overnight diesel spillage meant marshals had to wash parts of the track before a truncated first session could take place.

That rendered much of FP1 meaningless, as once the drivers built up the courage to fit slick tyres they had to slip and slide through one significant section of the track (from Turns 7-10), ruining their chances of completing any decent, consistent laps.

Including a drenched Friday last time out at Suzuka, four of the last five free practice sessions in F1 have been rain affected or otherwise severely compromised by H2O, making them largely pointless. This naturally calls their purpose into question.

Nico Hulkenberg thinks Formula 1 practice is too long © XPB

Autosport columnist and ex-F1 racer Karun Chandhok suggested after the Japanese GP that F1's format may need shaking up in some way to make it more interesting, perhaps by compressing the events so that grands prix take place over two days rather than three, while Force India racer Nico Hulkenberg has recently suggested F1 does too much practice, which makes it easier for teams and drivers to catch up if they run into trouble on a given weekend.

Looking at the spectacle of F1, or 'the show', the point is valid. The track time could certainly be utilised differently, perhaps by creating a competitive element to Fridays that makes for more compelling viewing than glorified testing (or sitting in the garage in the case of Sochi 2015).

"The only way to do something is to make sure there is something to be gained [from being on track]," argues Pirelli motorsport boss Paul Hembery.

"You're running in practice sessions with the intention of preparing for a race weekend, but if you really want to make people work [you need] to give awards, and that needs to be for every single day.

"If you want to see serious running you've got to make it worthwhile. There's got to be an incentive. GP2 has qualifying on Friday, race one on Saturday and race two on Sunday. You've got three days where you can win something."

This is not the case in Formula 1 of course, where even a Friday that runs smoothly is simply 'testing on television'. Pirelli says the teams are knowledgeable enough to race safely and properly without Friday practice, and there are many occasions - Suzuka being one recent example - where the loss of Friday running created no serious anomalies.

So you could in theory condense the format and save everyone the bother, but that would have a substantial knock-on effect for race promoters, who are already squeezed hard at the margins by the cost of hosting a grand prix.

Carlos Sainz Jr had a boring day... © XPB

If you're going to stick with the current format of televising Friday practice, to a certain extent you will just have to take what you can get as a fan. This is testing after all, and it is unusual to see practice broadcast worldwide in a major sport.

Short clips of football training sessions sometimes appear in news bulletins, but you won't generally see live coverage. Glancing at their schedule, it seems even Manchester United's own dedicated TV channel would rather show replays of old matches than broadcast live training sessions...

There are some F1 drivers - Valtteri Bottas was a good example last year; Romain Grosjean this - who have had to sacrifice some Friday morning sessions so their teams' reserve/third drivers can get some track time. All drivers like to be driving, of course, but this has not generally unduly affected the rest of their weekends. They are only placed at a disadvantage relatively on a 'normal' weekend because their situation does not apply to the entire grid.

"We are to a point where we are well set-up and normally we don't lose too much by missing a session," says Grosjean, who admitted he "didn't even sit in the car" on Friday at Sochi.

"It's never going to be ideal, but it is what it is right now so we just live with it. The hardest part for the engineers [this weekend] is we don't know the fuel consumption, the tyre degradation, brakes. There are a lot of unknowns."

Even in these days of restricted testing and ubiquitous simulation, teams naturally still want real-word track time to validate their experiments and upgrades. Witness McLaren's Fernando Alonso running comfortably more laps than anyone else on Friday here.

...as did Nico Rosberg © XPB

Honda needed to test out its new internal combustion engine (which won't be used again this weekend), and an updated (for reliability reasons) MGU-H and turbo. Plus, Alonso ran in the afternoon with a troubled unit from Suzuka that needed "calibration" after Honda identified some solutions after its home GP.

These laps, however compromised by water on the track, are still of fundamental value to the team. The more information you have, the easier things will be.

Here there is perhaps a compelling argument for doing away with a full day of practice. Teams have grown too effective and too clever for their own good. Generally speaking, taking away information from them, or somehow rendering their data useless, tends to make for more exciting races. F1 is always best when it is more unpredictable, such as in Hungary last year where rain just before the start mixed up the order and forced strategists to think on the hoof.

Grosjean again: "Well, if you look at the last race in Suzuka, we thought option/option/prime was the best strategy for the race and in the end it was option/prime/prime and we could have potentially beaten Hulkenberg with that.

"So yes, because we didn't have that long run on Friday maybe things were not as straight as they would have normally been, [but] I don't think it's going to change massively the order.

"When Mercedes is dominating as they were in Suzuka, they were going to finish one-two anyway, and the order was the one we were expecting.

"When I was in GP2 the only thing I knew is that half-an-hour free practice and straight into qualifying was too short. When you are a rookie it is very difficult. I didn't like it. I like the way Formula 1 is, and I don't think it would change the world to change anything."

Alonso at least got some work done © LAT

If you must maintain the Friday running, why not tweak the format to give the day a competitive focal point and force drivers out of their garages (or out of their in-car slumber in Massa's case)?

"I don't think it's part of the history and the way Formula 1 has been working," counters Grosjean. "The fans are happy it's a grand prix weekend and Sunday is what counts.

"It's not perfect when the weather is like this. If we know the session is going to be wet you could move the session and so on, but most of the time it works pretty well.

"There are tracks where we are limited with tyres, that's why we're not running much, the problem is every time we get more we wait for the track to be cleaner, so I don't know what we could potentially do.

"It's not great for the fans, on the other hand if we go out today and crash and we don't have any spares, what do we do? We miss the weekend and what we want to do is race and score points on Sunday. We take a risk we don't want to take. I don't have the answer."

One positive to come from Friday being a washout is we should get a much more lively FP3 session, one Jenson Button is looking forward to because he expects it to be "action packed" as teams catch up on lost track time.

"It's going to be a busy morning, and it will be a good session for people watching," he said after Friday's running. "People will be doing high and low fuel, we have lots of tyres to play with, and this is a fun circuit to drive as well. So I'm looking forward to P3."

We all want to see the cars on track as much as possible, and ideally for all that running to matter to the world championship (beyond simple preparation and testing), but if nothing can be done with the format of F1 itself, for reasons of purity, practicality or otherwise, perhaps the answer is to introduce some kind of non-championship race event on the Friday to entertain the crowds and the TV audiences.

BMW briefly ran a Procar championship (from 1979-81) that pitted top F1 drivers against one another in identical cars on grand prix weekends. Why not revive this? There must be a manufacturer out there (that wouldn't compromise the drivers' existing corporate affiliations) that could provide and run cars in exchange for the worldwide promotion they would receive in return.

Surely that would make up for the F1 'action' we witnessed at Sochi on Friday, and it would beat watching a Russian dignitary driving Bernie Ecclestone around in the safety car...