Talk:Formula One racing
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[edit] Pre-Qualifying
The section on the history of the 107% rule is wrong.
DNQ came about from the time when there were more teams, and therefore more cars, than could be permitted on the track for the race. The number permitted in the race used to vary from circuit to circuit (You can imagine that Monaco has a rather lower capacity than Silverstone), but was standardised at 26, presumably in the 1980s when Bernie and the FIA were busy standardising everything else. Only the quickest 26 would qualify for the race, the others were DNQ.
Pre-Qualifying is another matter again. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there were so many cars trying to qualify for each race (well over 30 if memory serves) that there were too many even for the qualification session (it's only an hour and you can imagine the difficulties of trying to squeeze everyone on - it's bad enough now with only 22). A pre-qualification session for new teams and the teams with the worst record over the preceding 6 months allowed two cars into the qualifying session proper of about 30 cars. This has got nothing whatever to do with the 107% rule.
The 107% rule only came about in (I think) the mid 1990s, when the number of teams started dropping so far that there were only 26 cars entered for each race anyway. There was therefore no prospect of anyone failing to qualify for the race, no matter how poor (Think Andrea Moda or Lola's Mastercard sponsored effort). Precisely because there had recently been a number of joke teams, the rule ensured that if you turned up with a comedy car and only an approximate idea of what you were doing and couldn't get within 107% of the pole-sitters time, you wouldn't get into the race.
The fact that there are now only 22 cars (less than the limit for the race1) is not therefore the reason for the 107% rule being dropped - what I'm trying to remember is why they did change it. If I remember, I'll come back and amend the article. I don't know that all the historical stuff needs to be in here, just an accurate reflection of why 107% has been dropped. A note on what the qualification rules for each season were would be useful in each of the season summaries, though.
1. The limit on cars in a race has recently dropped to 24 - I'm not sure that's anything to do with racing necessity so much as the reluctance of the teams to divide up the pie with too many others. 4u1e
I can confirm that most, if not everything, that 4u1e wrote above is correct. I belive that only 20 cars was allowed in the race at Monaco for quite some time. I just checked the race archive in grandprix.com and it gives an example of prequalifing in 1989: 38 cars were entered so on friday morning 12 cars were reduced to 4 for the real qualifing. /Kakis 2006-05-06
