How a Grand Prix weekend works
Three days at the track
Each round of the championship is a Grand Prix, and it lasts three days. Friday is for free practice: teams fine-tune their cars and drivers get used to the track, but practice doesn’t affect the result. Saturday is qualifying, which decides the starting order. Sunday is the race, and that’s where the points are.
Gridlap shows every session in your time zone, and the bot can remind you before the start — you choose how many minutes ahead.
Free practice
A normal weekend has three one-hour practice sessions: two on Friday and one on Saturday morning. Teams test the car on short and long runs. The short ones show one-lap pace on fresh tyres; the long ones show how the car handles on a full tank and how the tyres wear towards the end of a race.
The practice timesheet is a hint, not a forecast: everyone runs different programmes, fuel loads and tyres, and the fastest driver on Friday won’t necessarily be the fastest on Sunday.
Qualifying
Qualifying has three parts: Q1, Q2 and Q3. In each one, drivers go for their fastest laps. After the first two parts the slowest are knocked out, and in Q3 the top ten fight for pole position — first place on the grid.
Grid position matters a lot: overtaking is hard at many tracks, and a good Saturday often does half the job for Sunday. Penalties can move a driver back on the grid — for example, for changing power unit parts beyond the season’s allowance.
The race
The race begins with a formation lap: drivers warm up their tyres and brakes and line up in their places on the grid. The start is signalled by the lights: five red lights come on one by one, and when they all go out at once, the race is on.
A race is about 305 kilometres long (shorter in Monaco) and can’t last more than two hours. Everyone pits at least once along the way: in a dry race, the rules require every driver to use at least two different tyre compounds.
Sprint weekends
Six rounds of the 2026 season are sprint weekends. They have just one practice session, on Friday, followed by sprint qualifying, which also has three parts. Saturday brings the sprint — a short race of about a third of the usual distance, with no mandatory pit stop — and after it, qualifying for the main race.
In the sprint, the top eight score points: eight for the win and one fewer for each place after that. Sunday’s race runs as usual.
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