Three days, four or five sessions, one set of points. Once you know what each session is for, a Grand Prix stops looking like cars going round in circles.
Practice, then qualifying, then the race. Practice is for learning the track and setting up the car. Qualifying decides the starting order. Only the race pays points.
| Day | Session | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| Friday | Practice 1 and 2 | Nothing. It is homework. |
| Saturday | Practice 3 | Last hour to fix the car before it is locked. |
| Saturday | Qualifying | The starting grid for Sunday. |
| Sunday | The Grand Prix | Everything. All the points. |
Two hour-long sessions. No points, no prizes, and it looks like the least important day of the weekend. It is not. This is where a team finds out whether the car it built in a wind tunnel behaves the same way on a real, bumpy, hot piece of tarmac.
Watch what the drivers do rather than the lap times. They run one lap flat out on fresh tyres to see the car at its best, then a long run on old tyres to see how fast the rubber falls apart. That second exercise is what decides Sunday's strategy, and the times from it are usually far more revealing than anybody's headline lap.
Qualifying is one hour and it is the best hour of the weekend. It runs in three parts, and cars are eliminated as it goes.
A qualifying lap is a driver alone against the clock with nothing in the way, and it is the purest thing in the sport. Get it a fraction wrong and you are three places back before the race has even started. As soon as qualifying ends the cars are locked under what is called parc fermé rules: teams can no longer change the important settings. Whatever the car is on Saturday evening, that is what it races on Sunday.
A Grand Prix is run over the number of laps that takes it just past 305 kilometres, so at most circuits that is somewhere between fifty and seventy laps and around ninety minutes of racing. Monaco is shorter, because the track is short and the walls are close. There is a time limit too: the race has to be done within two hours of running.
The start is the part everyone remembers. Cars roll round a formation lap to warm tyres and brakes, line up on the grid, and five red lights come on one at a time. When they all go out, the race is on. More positions change in the first six seconds of a Grand Prix than in the next half hour.