The days of endless testing in F1 are behind us. Now teams are only allowed to practice with the car on official test days, film days and free practice sessions. If it is up to F1 boss Stefano Domenicali, there will be even less training in F1 in the future. He has said he wants to cancel free practice sessions. Now it appears that he is coming back to that, but he still wants fewer free practice sessions in F1.
Domenicali talked about it earlier on the Portuguese sports channel Sports TV: ‘I am in favor of scrapping the free practice sessions. They are very important to engineers, but the public doesn’t like them.’ Domenicali already returns to that statement Racingnews365. He wouldn’t want to skip the workouts altogether, but want to look for a way to make the sessions more relevant.
Every session something to fight for
The boss of F1 is still in favor of fewer free practice sessions. This is evident from a quote from last year. Then Domenicali told a press conference that he wants to reduce the number of free practice sessions from three to one. “I would be very aggressive to have one morning free practice on Friday and then every time we go out on track, something to reward.”
With reward, he probably thinks of points. So everything has a competitive element. Now free practice sessions are literally driving laps. According to him, this viewing pleasure is very important for the fan and the sport. ‘Ultimately, in sport you have to be able to fight for something.’
The F1 boss understands there is resistance to such a drastic move: “As always – when you change something, I remember last year [toen de F1 de sprintraces introduceerde] – do you have people who are for and people who are against. This is part of, as I say, a normal discussion.’ Domenicali said this in August of last year. There are currently no concrete plans to cancel training courses. You can decide for yourself to what extent Domenicali is ‘very aggressive’.
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