Twenty-two cars will roll out for Q1 this season, and when the clock stops, six of them, not five, will already be packing up for the night. That single change in arithmetic traces back to Cadillac’s arrival as Formula 1’s eleventh team, which pushed the grid from twenty cars to twenty-two and forced the FIA to rewrite the numbers that decide who survives each stage of qualifying. The governing body’s own regulatory text is blunt about it: “If twenty-two (22) Cars are eligible six (6) will be eliminated” in each of the first two segments, a clause that quietly ended a run of seasons in which only five drivers fell at a time.
Under the revised format, Q1 opens with all twenty-two cars and strips away the slowest six, leaving positions P17 through P22 to start the race from wherever they qualified. Q2 then begins with sixteen survivors and repeats the trick, eliminating six more to fill P11 through P16, before Q3 settles into the ten-car shootout for pole that fans have known since qualifying’s three-part structure was introduced in 2006. Lap times do not carry over between stages either; once a driver’s session ends, that time is deleted, so nobody can bank a fast Q1 lap and coast into Q2 on it.
The six-eliminated format is not new to Formula 1, even if it has been absent for a decade. It last applied in 2016, the previous season in which the grid also numbered eleven teams, a coincidence of arithmetic that the sport is now repeating almost exactly as Cadillac’s arrival restores both the headcount and the elimination math that went with it. The FIA reportedly considered a blunter solution first, cutting seven drivers after Q1 alone rather than splitting the load, but settled on an even six-and-six split across Q1 and Q2 specifically to keep both sessions competitively balanced.
A further wrinkle arrived in February, when the FIA confirmed it was lengthening Q3 from twelve minutes to thirteen while trimming the break beforehand from eight minutes to seven, holding the full qualifying hour together even as the pole shootout gained breathing room. The change was aimed squarely at the pit-lane congestion that had built up in 2025, when teams began queuing cars in the closing minutes of Q3 to control exactly when their drivers crossed the line, and the extra minute was meant to ease the pressure on strategists to release cars at split-second intervals. Q1’s eighteen minutes and Q2’s fifteen were left untouched by that revision.
Sprint weekends follow the same elimination pattern in miniature, with SQ1 running twelve minutes and cutting six cars, SQ2 running ten minutes and cutting six more, and SQ3 lasting eight minutes for the shorter pole fight. It is a format built for a grid still finding its footing: Cadillac’s debut lineup pairs Valtteri Bottas with Sergio PΓ©rez, two drivers who now share a 22-car grid matching the size last fielded in 2016, an era covered in motorsport’s recent engineering history. The elimination logic itself is not unfamiliar to fans who follow how other series carve down their fields, including the bracket NASCAR uses to set its playoff grid at Daytona.
Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s single-seater director, framed the philosophy behind the wider grid and its tougher cars when the 2026 regulations were unveiled. “When we have the 22 best drivers in the world, we should also have cars that are not exactly easy for my grandma to drive,” he said.
