Canadian Grand Prix 2014, Montréal - Race 7/19

I genuinely thought the order would be Merc, RBR, Williams, Ferrari, Force India then Mclaren this weekend....

What happened to Force India ? They were looking stronger than us in practice and thought they had generally a better car at the moment.
 
Skeeter said:
Was that when he said about losing Friday practice would mean losing 3rd drivers, and therefore the £m they bring? And Crofty then said that the more you think about it the worse an idea it becomes?

Its pathetic that its even been suggested.
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I do think that IF it happened, young drivers paying 2-4 mil for a couple FP1 sessions a year would still happily pay for the 2 young driver designated test days. Okay, there is less coverage and less fans in attendance and worse is that they are through the day testing that isn't conducive to being on tv due to the time slot/length. But ultimately those young drivers are paying 2-4mil upfront for the shot to eventually make 10-20mil a year in wages and be F1 drivers, they'll still pay for that chance.

So I'm not sure the income from young drivers is a particularly genuine concern. It's not like given a test that a sponsor maybe paying for the driver to have the chance will find the team changing the livery with said new sponsor(afaik, if they do I never notice so it's not working :p ).


The biggest hit is with fans at the track, when you reduce it to one session in the evening a lot less people will bother showing up on a friday. Surely that also hurts the potential income for every other event on during the day.

Get rid of friday totally, which will hurt the sport, or keep both sessions.

You wonder if sponsors would be happy with their names on cars being cut down from 7 hours(roughly) to 5.5hours, some teams might well find sponsors saying, 20% less time on track, we'll pay you 5-10% less(because quali/race obviously have much higher viewing figures). Then you could end up losing more than you save.
 
And what about Sponsors? That'd be the biggest hit and the sponsors provide for the teams massively. Cutting away a whole practice session is a lot of time not spent advertising.
 
smr said:
I genuinely thought the order would be Merc, RBR, Williams, Ferrari, Force India then Mclaren this weekend....

What happened to Force India ? They were looking stronger than us in practice and thought they had generally a better car at the moment.
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Hmm, most weird is that Perez topped the speed trap in qualifying, Hulk a little down but not far, Perez during Q1 and Hulk Q2 judging by time set. They are both way down in sector 1 though, so not enough downforce, high straight line speed and no downforce. They were 14/15th fastest in sector 1, and 10th(for Hulk) in sector 2 and 3. Sector 1 is certainly where they lost out the most and they were still losing too much in corners in the rest of the track despite the high top speed.

They really needed a bigger gap(only like 0.2kph) for dropping that much downforce.

They might find themselves with the best tire wear in the race and that might work out, but being 10th fastest around the track even with potentially one less pitstop I don't think will work out particularly well for them. If they were 15th fastest in S1, but fastest in S3 then it makes sense but their strategy doesn't appear to have remotely worked out for them.

RBR 12kph down in the speed trap on FI/Williams, just under 10kph down on the Merc.
 
smr said:
And what about Sponsors? That'd be the biggest hit and the sponsors provide for the teams massively. Cutting away a whole practice session is a lot of time not spent advertising.
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That's why I said sponsorship also :p

I don't know how it would break down though, race/qualifying will get much higher ratings than FP1 in particular. The extra set for the first 30 mins has increased running in FP1 to make it a bigger difference though. But while less people watch it, having lots of video from early on friday means lots of videos, news reports, pictures on websites for an extra day which has to factor in to sponsorship I would think.

I can imagine any savings being wiped out longer term when sponsors decide when renewing contracts that less time means it's worth less, but that might not be an immediate change in sponsorship reduction.

AUS 18 March 714,000 06:00
MAL 25 March 906,000 07:30
CHN 15 April 504,000 06:30
BHN 22 April 819,000 11:30

There is some data online for w/e 13 May (Spain), so we know that the
numbers were below 730,000 - the race didn't make the top 30 'Other'
channels (IE excluding BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4, Five).

The Chinese GP had 302,000 fewer viewers than the Malaysian GP. Could it
be that they migrated to BBC1 for that race? Be interesting to see the
detail for Spain, the second event covered live by the BBC.

Numbers for live qually:

AUS 348,000
MAL 456,000
CHN 251,000
BHN 462,000

And for live practice:

FP1 FP2 FP3
AUS ??? ??? ???
MAL ??? 70,000 ???
CHN 46,000 108,000 37,000
BHN 101,000 121,000 186,000

The unknown numbers reflect the fact that the broadcast didn't make the
top 10 for that week. The AUS FP1 had 65,000 viewers when replayed at
21:30, reflecting the 'middle of the night' airtime effect.
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No idea if these are accurate or not(google fu wasn't bringing up much except total race viewer comparisons), but suggets that in general figures increase for every session with a massive jump between FP3 and qualifying and then the race. China's FP3 decline being due to the silly time of morning I would presume.

So Bahrain Fp1 100k, fp2 120k, fp3 185k, qualifying 462k, race 820k.

So even though FP1 is 90 mins, it's weighted very low, with 1/8th of the viewers that the race has. outside of media coverage of the sessions(round ups, reports, articles) being able to start a few hours earlier FP1 is probably worth 5% of the sponsorship money at best, possibly less.

Actually you could factor in the time of day argument. I've watched races repeated later in the day, and old races. If I miss an practice session I rarely if ever go out of my way to watch a repeat. If it's all on at 3-8am I'll make an effort to get up for qualy and the race but not practice. So factoring in non live viewers and FP1 becomes almost inconsequential I would think.
 
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I think Hamilton will blitz past Rosberg pretty quickly, assuming there are no first corners shenanigans...
 
CaptainRAVE said:
Have just seen the result of quali - should be a good race :D

Lets see if Rosberg can keep Hamilton behind him without the help of a single lane Monaco circuit.
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justbeats said:
I think Hamilton will blitz past Rosberg pretty quickly, assuming there are no first corners shenanigans...
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The start is going to be interesting. I want a Lewis win :)
 
drunkenmaster said:
I do think that IF it happened, young drivers paying 2-4 mil for a couple FP1 sessions a year would still happily pay for the 2 young driver designated test days. Okay, there is less coverage and less fans in attendance and worse is that they are through the day testing that isn't conducive to being on tv due to the time slot/length. But ultimately those young drivers are paying 2-4mil upfront for the shot to eventually make 10-20mil a year in wages and be F1 drivers, they'll still pay for that chance.

So I'm not sure the income from young drivers is a particularly genuine concern. It's not like given a test that a sponsor maybe paying for the driver to have the chance will find the team changing the livery with said new sponsor(afaik, if they do I never notice so it's not working :p ).


The biggest hit is with fans at the track, when you reduce it to one session in the evening a lot less people will bother showing up on a friday. Surely that also hurts the potential income for every other event on during the day.

Get rid of friday totally, which will hurt the sport, or keep both sessions.

You wonder if sponsors would be happy with their names on cars being cut down from 7 hours(roughly) to 5.5hours, some teams might well find sponsors saying, 20% less time on track, we'll pay you 5-10% less(because quali/race obviously have much higher viewing figures). Then you could end up losing more than you save.
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The proposal also includes banning all in season testing. There would be zero point in young drivers signing up to teams as there would be no chance to ever drive the car.
 
smr said:
And what about Sponsors? That'd be the biggest hit and the sponsors provide for the teams massively. Cutting away a whole practice session is a lot of time not spent advertising.
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We probably need viewing and attendance figures for FP1 to talk about sponsors losing out much.

But yeah, rubbish idea on the whole.
 
FrankJH said:
Exactly - I very much doubt Sponsors would gain that much from practice sessions
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If I was a sponsor I would be using it as a reason to argue down my payments as much as possible.

As far as they are concerned its a 22% drop in TV time. I'd want to drop my payments by 22% too.
 
Skeeter said:
If I was a sponsor I would be using it as a reason to argue down my payments as much as possible.

As far as they are concerned its a 22% drop in TV time. I'd want to drop my payments by 22% too.
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Don't forget the sponsors use practice sessions for paddock access for VIP - the value of this shouldn't be underestimated.
 
And what about Circuit revenue on Fridays? Having just one Friday session in the evening would deter people from going on Fridays at all. I know this because I've been there and done it and I wouldn't go to all the effort for just an hour and a half's practice on one day.

It render Thursday pointless and literally half of the people that would normally attend a Friday at Silverstone and Spa for example wouldn't go full stop, only going for the Saturday and Sunday... therefore circuit revenue from food, merchandise etc. would be lost.

It's a ridiculous idea, at the end of the day F1 is a business and if you shut your shop up for half the day it's losing an incredible amount of money.

I for one wouldn't bother with just an hour and half on a Friday, and besides, those that do work 9-5 wouldn't be arsed going anyway as they'd most likely be too shattered from work, and after all - it's just a practice session. They'd much rather just get up on a Saturday morning and attend the circuit for the Qually and Race.

The whole reason it works having two sessions on the Friday is that people book the day OFF from work!

It'd totally destroy any camping vibe/feel around all of the GPs too.*

















*Except Korea :p
 
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