Formula 1,
explained

Formula 1 runs from March to December. Each round is one Grand Prix weekend at one circuit, and the teams pack up and fly to the next one, often a week later.

This season has its rounds spread across the world.

Points from every race add up to two championships running at the same time. The drivers' championship crowns the best driver. The constructors' championship crowns the best team, and a team's score is simply both of its drivers' points added together.

Most weekends follow the same rhythm: practice to find the right set-up, qualifying to set the starting order, then the race. A few weekends a year are sprint weekends, which swap two practice sessions for a short extra race on Saturday.

Qualifying lasts about an hour and comes in three parts. In Q1 (18 minutes) every car sets lap times and the slowest are knocked out. Q2 (15 minutes) knocks out the next group. The last ten fight it out in Q3 (12 minutes). The fastest lap of all takes pole position: first place on the grid.

Press play to watch the latest real qualifying session unfold.

Cars line up in qualifying order, two by two. After a formation lap to warm the tyres, five red lights come on one by one, a second apart. After a short random pause they all go out together, and the race is on. Move before they go out and it's a jump start, which earns a penalty.

Try it. Drivers react in about two tenths of a second.

A Grand Prix covers just over 305 km, usually 50 to 70 laps depending on the track, and can't run longer than two hours. In the dry, every car has to stop at least once to change tyres (chapter 5 explains why). The first car across the line when the chequered flag waves wins.

All teams use the same supplier, Pirelli. For each race Pirelli brings three dry compounds, always marked the same way: red soft, yellow medium and white hard. When the track is wet, drivers switch to grooved tyres that clear water: green intermediates for a damp track and blue full wets for heavy rain.

As a tyre wears, it loses grip and each lap gets a little slower. That is called degradation. A soft starts fastest but fades quickly; a hard starts slower but keeps going. Eventually any tyre hits a cliff, where grip falls away fast. That's the moment to stop for new ones.

One rule shapes every dry race: each driver must use at least two different dry compounds. That means at least one pit stop, so tyre choice and timing become the race's main tactic.

Changing four tyres takes a crew about two to three seconds. The real cost is the trip through the pit lane, where there's a speed limit: in total a stop costs around 20 to 25 seconds compared with staying out. Strategy is deciding when to pay that price, and how many times.

Below, three cars with the same pace race 56 laps on different plans. Change the tyre wear and your pit lap, then press play.

Two moves come up in every race. The undercut: pit a lap or two before the car ahead, then use fresh tyres to lap faster while they're still out on worn ones, and come out in front once they stop. The overcut is the reverse: stay out longer and hope your old tyres hold on while the other car warms up its new ones.

After a crash or debris, marshals need the cars to slow down. There are two ways to do it. The safety car drives out in front of the leader and everyone queues up behind it, with no overtaking, so the gaps between cars disappear. The virtual safety car (VSC) has no car at all: every driver must slow to the same reduced pace, so the gaps stay roughly where they were.

Switch between the three and watch what happens to the gaps.

That's why a safety car can change a race. A leader's 20-second cushion is gone in a few laps. Pitting also becomes cheap: with the field crawling, a stop costs roughly half the usual time, so teams often call their drivers in the moment it comes out.

A win is worth 25 points, and the top ten all score. Sprints pay the top eight, from 8 points down to 1. There's no bonus for the fastest lap any more; that was dropped in 2025.

The championship is decided the moment the leader is further ahead than the points still left to win. Nobody needs to win the last race; the maths simply runs out for everyone else.

Timing screens split each lap into three sectors. Colours do the talking: purple means the fastest of anyone so far, green is a driver's own best, and yellow is slower than their best.

Add a driver's three best sectors from different laps and you get their ideal lap: what they could do if everything came together at once. The gap between the ideal and the real best shows how much time was left out there.