CaptainNovolin

Holy shit, the manors are actually competitive this year!!

Kvyat having car issues for the second time this weekend. Maybe Red Bull aren't having luck with their watch engines.

The tear-offs thing has been in the rules for many years now, it's just never been enforced. I wonder if it actually will be this year.

@burgavo: A lot of cars went out just in time to be eliminated 10 seconds before they could finish a lap, and the only real surprise was that kvyat qualified in 18th because he had a shitty lap and they couldn't get more fuel/new tires on fast enough to get him out again.

actually revamping qualifying to be an elimination system that makes sense and is fair to the teams would involve messing with the timer depending on the track, as 90 seconds is probably fine for shorter tracks, but way too little for spa (or even melbourne). You'd probably have to adjust the amount of time teams have to set their opening laps, too, since the faster teams are going to get in the way of slower teams, and vice versa. You'd also need to bump up the amount of time before drivers get eliminated so that slower teams can actually respond to eachother, rather than having a shit lap and then resigning. The top of the field aren't going to make a huge mistake and get eliminated in the first go, unless something goes horribly wrong (like kvyat)

Before you could react to other teams if you were on the slower end, but now if you're in the bottom part of the session you're fucked because you only have one, maaaaybe two good laps to try to get a time. It does nothing for the fastest cars, and actively hurts competition in the midfield/back.

I think I officially don't like the new quali. It's supposed to mix things up, but it only penalizes the slower teams who can't get out early, since the faster teams are closer to pit exit, and they don't have enough time to dial in a good lap. If you can get past the first two eliminations, you can heat up your tires/brakes, get dialed in, all that shit, but if you're in danger of getting eliminated super early, you don't get a chance to really hit your groove and actually fight it out.

Quali seems like a complete trainwreck, but I think it'll take a couple races before we know for sure if it's a good or a bad trainwreck. Palmer's lap going down to the wire was pretty exciting, but that probably would have happened in traditional quali anyway.

Sky doesn't have Jordan, which more than makes up for anything else.

FP1 and 2 were wet as hell so it's hard to draw any conclusions from that, but the manor cars don't seem to be too far behind the rest of the pack. Maybe they'll be more than moving traffic cones this year.