Vettel keen to shorten Grand Prix weekends
F1 News
- GPblog.com
The Grand Prix weekend at the Nürburgring has rekindled the discussion about a shorter race weekend. No more Friday practice sessions to make Sunday more exciting during the race, but are the drivers happy with that?
The three practice sessions have been said to give the teams too much data and make it too easy during qualifying and the race, so the theory is that by reducing practice time, we will see more surprising grids and race results.
Vettel want to shorten the weekends
At the Nürburgring, for example, there was no opportunity to make progress on Friday, which made for an exciting race, with closer battles, especially in the midfield. Sebastian Vettel doesn't really see the benefits and would prefer if Thursday was removed.
''If no one is going to drive on Friday, people no longer have a reason to come to the track on Friday. You just have less on your programme then. I myself would be in favour of deleting the Thursday instead of the Friday," says Vettel according to Motorsport-total.com.
Less time for engineers
"What does change if you take the Friday away is the work with the engineers. Then you don't really get the chance to work on your setup in the evening and the power of those engineers is taken away," concludes Vettel. Lewis Hamilton recognises that such a rule can have a negative effect on Mercedes.
"That would make it harder for us yes. Normally you have two sessions on Friday where you can make a lot of changes to the setup. If you start on Saturday you don't have time for all that. It does have an advantage, because it saves 22 days on the calendar in which we pollute the air with 20 cars," concludes Hamilton.