Practice sessions

[andburg]

remember the good old days when F1 had loads of test sessions...New parts could be tried, setup changes that may not be legal.

I keep thinking it'd be good to have free practice back rather than qualifying practice which means all the cars must be 100% legal all the time. Do we think there would be any appetite from teams if they could opt out of the qualifying aspect of practice?

[andburg]

My understanding was free practice wasn't really free as if they don't run qualifying for whatever reason "free" practice can be used to set the grid.

[andburg]

Siao said:

andburg said:

My understanding was free practice wasn't really free as if they don't run qualifying for whatever reason "free" practice can be used to set the grid.

We don't have testing anymore, so free practise is the only time they can set up the cars. There is no luxury of testing new, fancy equipment, this has been the case for years. Pre-season testing is for that, and even then, it is limited.

that was my understanding

i dont see why teams can't say "I'm running development parts in this session" and have their times excluded from use should practice time become qualifying