How Formula 1 qualifying works

Published Invalid Date · figures as of the 2026 season.

Qualifying is a knockout in three parts. Every car runs in the first part; the slowest are eliminated after each part; the ten fastest run in the last part for pole position. The whole session takes about an hour on Saturday afternoon.

The three parts

Part	Cars	Length	Eliminated
Q1	22	18 minutes	The slowest six, who fill grid places 17 to 22
Q2	16	15 minutes	The slowest six, who fill grid places 11 to 16
Q3	10	12 minutes	None; the order sets grid places 1 to 10

With 22 cars on the 2026 grid, six drivers drop out in each of the first two parts; this site’s qualifying tables for 2026 show 16 drivers with a Q2 time and 10 with a Q3 time at every round. A driver’s best lap in each part is what counts, however many laps are driven. A lap is deleted if the car leaves the track with all four wheels, which is checked automatically at the marked corners.

The clock runs continuously within each part, with a short gap between parts. A red flag stops the clock; the part resumes with the time that was left. Drivers eliminated in Q1 and Q2 keep their position from that part, so a driver who sets the fastest time of the whole session in Q1 but is slow in Q3 starts from where Q3 put them.

Fastest time and pole position

Pole position is the first grid place after penalties, which is usually, but not always, the driver with the fastest time in Q3. Two things separate them:

Grid penalties. A driver who takes more engine or gearbox parts than the season’s allowance, or who is penalised for an incident in a previous race, starts further back than qualified. A penalty of more than 15 places sends the driver to the back of the grid. Since 2026 the parts allowance applies to the new power units, and the number of elements is set for the season in the regulations.
Session conditions. When rain or a red flag makes Q3 slower than Q1 or Q2, the fastest lap of the day can belong to a driver who did not reach Q3. In 64 of the 533 races with full qualifying data on this site, the fastest time of qualifying was set by someone other than the pole-sitter. The race pages show every driver’s best time of the session as a gap to the fastest time, labelled “fastest”, and the grid separately.

This site counts a pole as the first grid place where qualifying data exists (1994 on) and grid place 1 before that, which is why the records say “pole position” and the race pages say “fastest”.

Sprint qualifying

On sprint weekends a second, shorter knockout on Friday sets the grid for the sprint: three parts again, with less time in each and the tyre compound for each part set by the rules. The Saturday qualifying for the Grand Prix is unchanged.

Before 2006

The knockout format dates from 2006. Earlier systems included a single one-hour session with twelve laps per driver (until 2002), one flying lap per driver on each of two days (2003 and 2004) and a single flying lap with the cars carrying their race fuel (2005). The rules timeline on this site lists each change with its date.

What the figures say

Starting first matters more than most people think, and more than it used to: 57% of races in the 2020s have been won from grid place 1, against 28% in the 1980s. The article on pole position and winning has the figures by decade and by circuit, and every circuit page shows its own pole-to-win rate.