Name: Formula 1 Beginner's Guide - The Basics
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T14:28:25.000Z
Duration: 7 min 17 s
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Welcome to the complete beginner's guide to Formula 1, which I've compressed down into different videos.

This video is all about the basics, so let's get started.

Formula 1 is the pinnacle of motorsport, where drivers and teams compete for top honours across a long and gruelling season.

Currently, there are 10 teams competing in Formula 1, but that number can increase.

Each team has two drivers, and while these two drivers earn points for the team in the race to be the constructors champion, they are also competing against each other, and all the other drivers, for the real glory, the Drivers' Championship.

F1 has strict regulations put in place by the governing body, the FIA.

These regulations tell each team exactly what they can and can't do when it comes to designing their cars, but what's important is that each car is different.

Sure, some cars may look similar in areas, and the overall shapes might be similar, but each team has to design their own car with their own team of professionals working behind the scenes to get the most out of each part.

The current season of Formula 1 has 23 races, but this number can go up and down.

New races are added, and other tracks are removed from the calendar when contracts expire.

Race locations range from Britain, Japan, Bahrain, and F1 is even racing in Las Vegas this year.

Each race weekend has multiple race sessions.

Friday has two one-hour practice sessions.

These two hours are for the drivers to get up to speed with the track, and make any changes they need to to the car.

Then on Saturday, you have the third and final practice session, which is done a couple of hours before qualifying, which takes place later that day.

During the practice sessions, drivers can change anything they want on the car, providing of course it's legal.

They can change suspension, tyre angles, front wings, rear wings, but once you go out for qualifying, you enter Parc Fermé, and that means the parts that are on your car are the ones you will take into qualifying and the race.

You're only able to change a few small things, including wing angles.

Qualifying is split into three parts, Q1, Q2, and Q3.

Q1 lasts for 18 minutes and the slowest five drivers are knocked out of qualifying, and they will start 16th-20th based on their fastest lap times.

Then Q2 takes the 15 fastest drivers from Q1, and after 15 minutes, another five drivers are eliminated, again with their starting positions based on their fastest time from the session.

Q3 is then a top 10 shootout between the fastest 10 drivers to form the top 10 of the grid for the main event, which is the race on Sunday afternoon.

Every race has a different amount of laps, depending on the track's distance, with the minimum distance required to be 305km, except for Monaco, which gets a pass to run less.

Every driver can choose what tyre they start the race with, with three to choose from.

I'll explain tyres in more detail in a minute, so don't worry.

The tyres are labelled as soft, medium, and hard.

Soft tyres have a red stripe, mediums a yellow stripe, and the hard tyres have a white stripe.

The softer the tyre, the fastest lap time it will be able to produce, offering up the most grip, but the reality is they won't last as long.

The hard tyres are the opposite, less initial grip and therefore slower lap times, but they will last a lot longer.

During the race, every driver must use two different tyre compounds.

This means that if you start the race on the soft tyre, you have to switch to either the medium or the hard during the race.

You can stop as many times as you want though and switch to different compounds, the only rule is that you have to use at least two.

The only exception to this rule being if the race starts or becomes a wet race.

Speaking of wet tyres, there are two of those.

The Intermediate is the most versatile wet weather tyre, used for wet weather but with limited standing water.

They have a green stripe, then the Blue Mac'd full wet tyres are used for heavy rain with a lot of standing water.

Although more often than not, if there's heavy rain, the cars don't tend to run anyway so these tyres don't get used all that often.

Pirelli have 6 tyre compounds that they use for Formula 1.

C0 is the hardest tyre, so like I said before, these offer less ultimate grip but they offer more durability.

C5 is the softest tyre available so it will give the best performance but it's not going to last very long.

Before races, Pirelli choose which three of the available six tyres they want to bring to a race weekend.

They do this based on the characteristics of the track and even how abrasive the circuit is.

These three chosen tyres then fit into the category of soft, medium and hard depending on where they fit in the scale, so it's easier to follow during the race weekend.

Drivers do not have an infinite pool of tyres they can use over the course of a weekend.

Pirelli provide 13 sets of tyres to each driver to use throughout the sessions.

In 2023, the allocation of tyres for every competitor is 8 sets of soft tyres, 3 sets of mediums and 2 hards.

As well as that, every driver does get 4 sets of intermediate tyres and 3 sets of full wet, should it be rainy conditions.

After every practice session, a driver must return 2 sets of tyres to Pirelli.

So by the time qualifying begins, a driver will have just 7 sets of tyres to make it from Q1 until the chequered flag.

Teams have to be very clever with how they use their tyres to get the most out of both practice and qualifying without running out of tyres.

If you make it into Q3 as well, every driver has to hand back one final set of tyres, whereas if you don't make it into Q3, you don't have to hand back that final set.

There is also no refuelling in F1 anymore, so cars start the race with the required amount of fuel they need to complete the race.

At the end of the race, drivers score points for finishing in the top 10, with 25 points for 1st, 18th for 2nd, 15th for 3rd, all the way down to 1 point for 10th.

You also gain a bonus point for the fastest lap during a race.

Sprint race weekends are also a new addition to Formula 1, which does complicate things a bit because the format for those are a little bit different.

There will be 6 sprint race weekends in 2023.

In this format, there's only one practice session on the Friday and qualifying takes place that evening.

There is then only one practice session on Saturday before a sprint race takes place later that day, with the grid set by the qualifying from Friday.

The sprint race is exactly that, a much shorter race taking place over 100km, but the finishing positions in the sprint race will then set the grid for the feature race, which takes place on Sunday as normal,

meaning drivers need to be ever more cautious with their moves.

Just to confuse things further, at one or more of the upcoming sprint races, the FIA is testing a new sprint weekend format.

This would see FP2 scrapped on the Saturday in favour of a second qualifying.

The idea is you would have qualifying on the Friday for the main weekend's race on Sunday, and then on Saturday, FP2 would be replaced by a sprint race qualifying.

It's unclear right now though if they're going to stick with this going forward.

Points are also awarded differently than a main race.

The winner of the sprint race gets 8 points, with 2nd place getting 7th, 3rd 6th etc, all the way down to 1 point for 8th place.

And there we have the basics of Formula 1.

In the next video, we're going to look at the cars themselves, all the way down to the engines that power them.

I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did, leave a like and subscribe, and I'll see you next time.