Old Qualy system is back

Well they reverted to the old qualy system. Something for which Sky pushed hard indeed.

But here is what's bugging me - I really dislike the old system. The reason is that there is too mu h going on in very little time and as a result you dont really see anything. There is no option to monitor one driver's lap in depth, looking at his lines, sector times, etc. Indeed, very often we wind up with seeing the final standings, but without knowing e.g. how was Lewis 1tenth quicker than rosberg. Maybe he won it all in sector three, maybe he was just a fraction quicker in each sector -
We dont learn that.

So here is some hope that they will change the format for next year.

In the UK we normally see side-by-side comparison laps between the pole-sitter and the second placed guy (so both Mercedes most of the time), usually before the race.

I grant you that it's hard to gain any real knowledge from everyone qualifying at once, but then I found the single-lap qualifying format overly flat (other than that awesome session at Magny-Cours, but I think that was it).

I didn't mind the elimination qualifying as such, but the implementation of it was very poor. With some tweaking it could have worked, but it was rushed in with no prior thought about how a session would unfold. The major (unsolvable) problem was that a top team didn't need to do a flat-out lap to progress, so the one thing Bernie was trying to get (a top car near the back) would never happen as the likes of Mercedes didn't need to try 100% to progress through the first two sessions. It was always more likely to eliminate potential challengers to Mercedes and Ferrari, like Williams, and thus do exactly the opposite to what they were trying to do.

i agree gav, Sky offer great comparison between the pole sitter and the second placed car. Still, it is post-fact um, i.e. you already know how it has unfolded. One solution that I would have loved to see is, e.g. eliminate 8 cars in q1 and q2 each, so that only 6 cars are left to battle it at the end. But inevitably, the slowest of those 6 may opt not to run.