No advantage by cutting practice

(Sahara Force India Formula One Team)

The smaller Formula One team's are against the potential for Free Practice to be reduced from next season. It emerged on Friday that a proposal being considered by the team's is to reduce Friday running at a Grand Prix weekend from two practice session's to just a single 90 minute session on a Friday afternoon early evening to allow team's extra time to arrive at the track. However, this has not gone down well with some teams.

Formula One's Strategy Group believes that by reducing the track time over a Grand Prix weekend that it will enable team's to save money. However others such as Force India are not convinced of the merits of introducing limited running. Andrew Green, the Silverstone based outfit's director commented:

'From Force India's perspective, we don't see this as cost-saving at all. For us, we've always looked to use the FP1 session to blood in some new drivers and that was an income stream for us and if we lose that, that's going to be a relatively severe blow, which, in turn, will have an impact on our technical ability so in that respect, I don't think it's cost-saving.'

Force India aren't the only team concerned about the new proposal as Sauber's Giampaolo Dall'Ara stated that for the Swiss based outfit track time is extremely important as it mean that they get increased television exposure which can result in greater financial benefits. 

While Sauber and Force India have been vocal in their opposition to the idea of reducing running at Grand Prix Mercedes Executive Director Paddy Lowe is backing the proposal as he believes that by reducing the on tracking running over a weekend it reduces the work load on the team personnel at the track and it also means that there is less stress placed on key car components such as power units.

Lowe revealed that it is still in the proposal stages and has yet to be signed off on as there is still a month to go before any decision must be finalized.

A reduction in running would also be mean that fan's who pay an awful lot of money to attend Grand Prix would be the main people to lose out particularly at flyaway Grand Prix such as the Canadian Grand Prix as an awful lot of Euorpean's fly out to North America to experience the Grand Prix.

That also has to be taken into consideration when the sport comes together to discuss how to cut costs.

© Ben Johnston 2014