Remember back in 2004 when Formula 1 had two single lap Qualifying sessions – one on Friday, one on Saturday – and you added the two lap times together to get the qualifying time for each driver? Well, most people didn’t like it, they said it was too complicated. Well this is nothing to the system used in A1GP!
This is my first taste of A1GP, as last year it was only available on Sky Sports and I didn’t subscribe, however, this year I do. Todays qualifying for A1GP is underway as I type this, and it involves four 15 minute sessions where every driver gets one shot per session to set a lap, they can this at anytime in each session, so you have multiple cars on track. Not too bad at moment, but then at the end of the four sessions you have to take each driver’s fastest two laps and add them together to get their qualifying time. So any action you watch on track is pretty much irrelevant until after all four sessions.
It makes it very difficult to stay interested – which is why I’m typing this whilst the qualifying is still in progress!
Ok, just to make it even more complicated, that’s only the qualifying for the sprint race, the feature race’s grid is made up of a combination of the qualifying, the results from the sprint race and the fastest laps from the sprint race!!!!
Hopefully the races themselves will be better to watch, as I really like the idea behind A1GP – Nation against Nation in the ‘World Cup of Motorsport’. The cars are cool, big V8 motors with no driver aids and limited downforce, although they aren’t the most attractive single seaters out there! Also with 23 Nations currently running one car each in the series there are more cars on the Grid than in F1 – albeit only by one car!
South Africa have taken Pole Position from Mexico in 2nd and France 3rd, with teamGB – run by the legendary John Surtees – in 6th.
Compton Grand Prix 