About Formula One

New to F1? Don't worry, this page will get you up to speed with the basics.

How do race weekends work?

Over the course of the Formula One season, there will be over 20 different locations around the world where the teams will travel to partake in a race weekend, spread over Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There are 10 teams each with 2 drivers (more details on this in the teams and drivers pages), culminating in a total of 20 cars. On Friday, there are 2 'Free Practice' sessions, each an hour long, where teams are allowed to adjust their cars to prepare the optimal setup for both the drivers and track (more on this later) and set practice lap times to test these set-ups. On Saturday, there is a further free practice session, followed by qualifying. Teams are under 'Parc-Ferme' regulations once qualifying begins, meaning they can no longer make any major changes to their set-ups. Qualifying is broken down into 3 sessions - Q1, Q2 and Q3, in that order. In Q1, all 20 drivers have 18 minutes to set the fastest lap time they can, after which the slowest 5 drivers are eliminated and the positions they finish in are where they will start on the grid for the race. In Q2, the remaining 15 drivers have another 15 minutes to set their fastest possible lap time (lap times from Q1 do not carry over into Q2, and lap times from Q2 do not carry over into Q3), after which the slowest 5 drivers are again eliminated and their starting positions set for the race. In Q3, the remaining 10 drivers have 12 minutes to again whiz around the track as fast as they can, after which the positions the drivers finish in is set for the race. Sunday is race day - the best day of a race weekend (usually)! Each track has a different number of laps (depending on track length), but the regulations state that a race cannot go on for longer than 3 hours once it has began (and yes, races can go on this long due to safety cars, red flags etc - more on these later). Once a race has concluded, the top three drivers partake in a podium ceremony, where the winner is first given a trophy, then the constructor winner receives theirs. The 2nd and 3rd place drivers then receive their trophies before the national anthem of the winning driver and constructor are played. The three drivers and constructor are given a bottle of champagne each which they spray on each other to celebrate their successes.

The Regulations

It would take all year for me to write the entirity of the regulations here, so here's a couple of links to the 2024 Official FIA regulations:

Sporting Regulations
Technical Regulations

Regulations are imperative for maintaining sporting integrity and ensuring a fair competition for everyone.

The race!

You may think a race is self-explanatory - cars compete to become the first to reached the chequered flag. And this is true, but it is not always that simple.
Firstly, let's address pit stops. The regulations state that all drivers must change tyre compound at least once during a race, and to do this you have to come into the pits. Pit stops can take anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds depending on the track, but all drivers must pit at least once and the timing of it can be crucial.
If there is an incident on the track, such as a collision, leaving large amount of debris on the track, three things can happen depending on the severity of the damage. If the damage is minimal and there is only a small amount of debris, a Virtual Safety Car (VSC) will be deployed, meaning drivers all have to 'respect their delta' (which is a fancy way of saying the race becomes neutralised, keeping the gap between all drivers the same). It limits drivers to around 60-70% of their original speed.
The next option if the damage is more severe is a full Safety Car (SC). This is where drivers bunch behind a sponsored safety car travelling at a slower speed in the order that they were at the instance the safety car was deployed. The only time drivers are allowed to overtake another driver in VSC or SC conditions is when a driver pits. The FIA (Formula One governing body) can decide to either allow cars that have been lapped to pass the safety car to unlap themselves or remain behind the safety car and stay lapped.
The final, most severe option is a red flag. This is where all drivers are forced to return to the pit lane and the race is stopped until the situation is sorted. Red flags can be caused by severe debris, bad weather conditions or anything else that causes the race track to become completely unsuitable for safe racing.

Tyre compounds

In Formula One there are both 'slick' and 'wet' tyres. There are 5 tyre compounds in F1 that fall under the 'slick' classification - the C1 (hardest), C2, C3, C4 and C5 (softest) compounds. A block of 3 tyres will be nominated to be used on a given race weekend - the softest of the 3 is called the soft tyre (denoted by a red strip on the tyre), the hardest of the 3 is called the hard tyre (white strip), and the one in the middle is the medium tyre (yellow strip).

But what are 'soft' and 'hard' tyres? The softer the tyre is, the more friction it is able to generate between itself and the track surface, which gives more grip to drivers travelling around corners. However, softer tyres are much more malleable/elastic, and whilst this gives more friction (as the tyre deforms more easily giving more area of contact between the tyre and track, and therefore more friction), this added friction unfortunately means the softer tyres degrade much quicker than harder tyres. Harder tyre compounds are the opposite - less friction, so less grip, meaning the car has to go at a slower speed around corners as friction is the primary contributor to the centripetal force required to allow the car to travel around the bend. But, hard tyres also degrade less quickly.

The tyres that fall under the 'wet' classification are as follows:

Intermediate tyres: designed for when the track is slightly wet (between 1mm and 4mm of standing water on the track surface). These have a green strip on the tyre.
Full wet tyres: Designed for when there is a large amount of standing water on the track surface (>4mm). These have a blue strip on the tyre.

Wet tyres have grooves in the surface of the tyre to allow a pathway for the water underneath the tyre to 'escape', preventing there being a layer of water between the rubber and track surface (which would cause a severe lack of grip) - this is called aquaplaning. However, the grooves mean that there is always less rubber in contact with the track surface, so if these tyres are used in dry conditions, the surface of the tyre will overheat massively, causing wet tyres on a dry track to wear out much faster than slick tyres. In dry conditions, wet tyres would also have less grip due to a lesser amount of rubber in contact with the track.

As tyres degrade and wear, graining can occur, which is where strips of rubber are torn from the tyre and immediately stick back on to the hot surface of the tyre, causing an uneven surface that hinders the tread from making full contact with the surface, reducing grip.

So, in conclusion, there is a trade-off when it comes to tyres. Temas have to weigh up, for example, whether it is quicker to do 30 laps on hard tyres or 2 15 lap stints on soft tyres - teams would have to look at the data of other drivers on the soft tyres to determine whether they would give enough of a pace advantage to make back the pit-stop time to those on the hard tyres. More on this in the race strategy section.