Qualifying sets the starting grid, and at circuits where overtaking is hard it often settles the race before it starts. A qualifying lap is a single attempt at the limit, with tyres, track conditions, traffic and energy all needing to line up at the same moment. This guide covers the format, what changes through a session, and how to read the data afterwards on StatChecked’srace data pages.
The knockout format
Qualifying runs as three sessions, each of which knocks out the slowest cars. With 11 teams and 22 cars on the grid in 2026, six drivers drop out at each stage:
- Q1, 18 minutes. All 22 cars run. The six slowest are eliminated and fill 17th to 22nd.
- Q2, 15 minutes. The remaining 16 run with the times reset. Six more drop out and fill 11th to 16th.
- Q3, 13 minutes. The top ten fight for pole position. Until 2025, Q3 lasted 12 minutes.
Short breaks separate the sessions. Times never carry over, so a driver eliminated in Q2 is placed by their Q2 time even if their Q1 lap was quicker.
Two rules sit around the edges. Under the 107% rule, a driver must set a Q1 time within 107% of the fastest Q1 lap to be allowed to start. The stewards can still let a driver race, typically one who showed competitive pace in practice, and the rule is lifted when the track is declared wet. Also, qualifying position is not always grid position: penalties for extra power-unit parts, gearbox changes or sporting offences move drivers back after the session. StatChecked’s results and teammate comparisons use the qualifying classification itself.
On sprint weekends a separate, shorter sprint qualifying (12, 10 and 8 minutes) sets the grid for the Saturday sprint. The main qualifying session sets the Grand Prix grid.
Track evolution
A circuit gets faster as a session goes on. Each lap lays rubber on the racing line and sweeps dust off it, so grip builds, and at street circuits and venues that see little racing the improvement can be dramatic. That is why the quickest laps usually come in the final minutes of each session, and why the order can reshuffle in the last 60 seconds.
Waiting has its own risks:
- Flags. A red flag, or a yellow in the final sector, can wipe out the last runs, so drivers who need a safe time set an early “banker” lap.
- Traffic. Cars slow down on out-laps to prepare their tyres, and a driver on a flying lap can come up behind one at the wrong moment. Impeding another driver can bring a grid penalty.
- Tows. At circuits with long straights, teams try to arrange a tow, running in another car’s slipstream to gain a few km/h.
- Track limits. A lap is deleted if the driver exceeds track limits at a monitored corner, which is why a provisional pole time sometimes disappears minutes later.
Tyres
Pirelli brings three dry compounds to each event. In dry qualifying almost everyone uses the softest of the three, because it gives the most grip over one lap. Each driver has a limited allocation of sets for the weekend, so teams ration new softs: a front-running car may get through Q1 on a single set and save fresh ones for Q3. Since 2022 the top ten have been free to choose their race-start tyres. They no longer have to start on the set used for their best Q2 time.
A soft tyre only works inside a temperature window. Too cold, and the car slides through the first sector. Pushed too hard, and the rear tyres overheat before the last. Warming them on the out-lap is a skill in itself, and at some circuits drivers run a slower preparation lap before the real attempt.
The 2026 power units add another layer. Electric power makes up a much larger share of the total than before, and the energy available on each lap is limited, so where a driver deploys and recovers it matters. On a speed trace this can show as speed tailing off before the end of a long straight.
Sectors and mini-sectors
Each lap is split into three timed sectors. Timing screens colour them: purple for the fastest of the session, green for a driver’s personal best and yellow for anything slower. Our live timing page uses the same colours. Adding a driver’s three best sectors gives their theoretical best lap, and the gap between that and their actual best shows how much time they left on the table. A driver with purple first and second sectors and a yellow third may have hit traffic, or simply overworked the tyres.
The official timing also divides each sector into many shorter mini-sectors and places speed traps around the lap. They pin down where the time goes, which matters because one sector can contain very different corners. For finer detail still, go to the telemetry.
Reading a lap-time delta trace
A delta trace plots the running time gap between two laps against distance around the lap. It starts at zero on the line and ends at the final gap between the two laps. Before reading one, check which driver is the reference: some charts show the reference driver’s advantage as positive, others as negative.
- Read the slope, not the height. A steep section means time is changing hands quickly at that point on the track.
- Flat sections mean the two cars were equally fast there.
- Steps usually appear in braking zones and slow corners, where small differences in speed cost the most time.
- A line that rises and falls back means a driver lost time in one place and won it back in another.
StatChecked’s telemetry tab doesn’t draw a delta line. It plots speed, throttle, brake, gear and RPM against distance for up to three drivers’ laps, and you can read the delta from the speed traces. Wherever one driver’s speed line sits above the other, that driver is gaining, and the gain is largest where speeds are low. Carrying 5 km/h more through 100 metres of corner at around 100 km/h is worth about 0.17 seconds. The same 5 km/h over 100 metres at 300 km/h is worth about 0.02 seconds. That is why slow corners decide so many laps, even though the straights are longer.
One caution: the public car data arrives about four times a second, and distance is worked out from speed. Small details get smoothed, and two laps can drift slightly out of line. A few hundredths in one corner may be noise; a tenth across a sector is real.
Why a tenth matters
At 300 km/h a car covers more than eight metres in a tenth of a second, more than its own length. Over a 90-second lap, a tenth is about 0.1% of the lap time. In recent seasons several grid places have often been separated by less than a tenth, and the Q1 cut can come down to hundredths. At circuits where overtaking is difficult, each of those places is hard to win back in the race.
The same scale applies to teammates over a season. A median qualifying gap of a tenth between two drivers in the same car is a real, repeatable difference, and our teammate comparison shows it for every pairing.
Studying a session on StatChecked
- Open the qualifying session on the race data page for the classification.
- Use the lap times tab to compare runs and watch the track improve through the session.
- Open the telemetry tab and pick two drivers’ fastest laps.
- Find where the speed traces separate, then check braking points, minimum speed and throttle pick-up, as our telemetry guide describes.
- Watch the same corner in the 3D replay.