What you may notice during F1 practice

When you watch Formula One drivers practice, keep a couple of things in mind.
First, being fastest isn’t everything. Although practice times are issued after each session, these times aren’t necessarily a definitive indicator of what shape every car is in. All teams work through their programmes in different ways and with different aims in mind. It’s often not until the qualifying sessions or the race that you see the true picture unfold as everyone tries to put together their best combination of factors. Treat the practice times as only a very loose indicator of competitiveness.
Second, some people get extra sessions. If you get to the track very early on Friday morning – well before the first official practice session – you’ll see some teams lapping the track while others never venture out and you may wonder why everyone isn’t out trying to beat the band. As a way of helping smaller teams cut costs, the FIA, the Formula One governing body, introduced a policy at the beginning of 2003 stating that a team could opt for one of the following:

• To have unlimited test days.
• To test up to a maximum of 20 car days (10 days for two cars or 20 days for one car) and be allowed to test for two hours on the Friday morning of each Grand Prix meeting.

The latter option is the cheaper one, but it has other advantages as well. It gives the teams a head-start in choosing the ideal tyre, in establishing fuel consumption figures, and in coming up with a good set-up. In terms of the work dedicated to the race weekend, by the time practice begins, they’re already one step ahead of those teams who can’t do the Friday test because they’ve opted for an unlimited number of test days outside of the Grand Prix weekends. The benefit of unlimited testing is that the total number of hours available for testing new developments and innovations is far greater. This particularly benefits the bigger teams who have more of such things to test than their smaller rivals.