It's Official: Qualifying returns to 2015 rules for China and onwards

It was confirm this afternoon (7/4/16), the much controversial new knock-out F1 qualifying format will be ditched once and for all and return back to the 2015-style qualifying format from the Chinese Grand Prix onwards, after the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone agreed to a request from the teams on Thursday.



All eleven teams, in a letter to FIA President Jean Todt and F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone, stated that they were against a move to aggregate qualifying, and expressed a desire to revert to last year's set-up.

Formula 1 used the new-for-2016 live knock-out elimination system in Australia and Bahrain, but it was heavily criticised on both occasions, with limit to no track activity in the closing stages of each knock-out phase.

Ecclestone and FIA were initially unwilling to back down and return to the 2015 format, instead asking the teams to consider a new two-lap aggregate system, but Thursday's surprise letter forced a rethink.

In my opinion, qualifying wasn't broken at all from the 2006-2015 qualifying format, the new knock-out format from Australia and Bahrain was completely awful and thankfully people from the teams and now the echoes of the FIA have common sense to revert back to the previous rules until the end of the season at least.

If anyone forgot what the 2015 qualifying are in two simple bullet points:

• six drivers will drop out at the end of Q1 and Q2
• ten drivers to battle it out for pole position in Q3

Simple. Back to the future for China.