"Cato Batista" 18/03/2016 16:36:36 ID #883

Ladies and Gentleman,

Welcome to the 2016 CFA Season. We’ll start activities tomorrow after the opening practice sessions at Albert Park.

The two changes that could impact racing the most this year are the new QF format and the new tyre regulations. Let’s get up to speed.

This is how qualifying will take place from now on, and believe me, this is more like playing musical chairs:

Same one hour in 3 segments, 16 minutes for Q1, 15m in Q2 and 14m  in Q3. Instead of cutting the slower cars at the end of each session, the slower car will be eliminated one by one every 90 seconds. In the old days the faster drivers could set a time and sit the rest of session saving a set of fresh tyres for the race. Now everybody will have to be on track lapping as fast as possible from the start. This way there will be only 2 cars fighting for pole in the last 90 seconds of Q3.

It will be fascinating to watch how teams will adapt best to the new format, of course they have it all planned already, but the season opener will be a very interesting case study.

And by the way, this new format start this Saturday not until Spain as I incorrectly said.

The next change we’ll have to analyze very close from now on is the tyre regulations.

Pirelli has introduced a new fifth different compound, the purple-walled ‘ultrasoft’ design for rapid warm-up and huge peak performance. The idea is that each driver will now have 3 compound choices per race instead of 2 like in years past. From its 5 types Pirelli will bring 3 compounds to each GP and the drivers will have to use 2 of those during the race. Instead of 10 sets they will now have an allocation of 13, 3 of those are pre-stipulated by Pirelli leaving 10 choices to the teams/drivers. and from these one set (the softest of the available range) will have to be used in QF. 

For Australia they’ll have at their disposal the medium (white), soft (yellow) and super-soft (red); they are free to use the softer of the 3 during the race but they must also use one of the 2 harder compounds (assuming it’s dry) for the race. Teams have to pick in advance how they want their allocation distributed and they can select different choices for their 2 drivers, for example in Australia Mercedes asked for 5 sets of soft and 5 sets of super-soft for Hamilton, and 1 medium, 4 soft and 5 super soft for Rosberg. Ferrari went with the same route for both VET & RAI: 1 med, 4 soft, 5 super-soft. Williams didn’t ask for any sets of mediums (4 soft, 6 s-soft) I guess they are expecting to be slower than the top teams already and they can’t  afford to use the slower compound.

All this will mean more work to understand tyre behaviour during the practice sessions, and obviously will require more communication and information sharing between drivers.

Will this result in better races? We shall see, in theory it will produce a wider range of race strategies and hopefully more on-track action.

Last and not so evident will be more radio-communication restrictions between driver and engineers, the idea basically to make life more difficult for drivers…

Well my friends, we are ready to start our challenging forecasting duties, we just have to wait for Friday's results to kick off our season.

Last year CFA winner was Manbos with 5 triples (tied with Maria and I), one of the better results of the season. Let’s see how this year starts.

Cheers

Cato