Officials Gazette Friday Edition 2016 Formula 1 Rolex Australian Grand Prix

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1 March 18th 2016 Page 1 CHATTING WITH CHARLIE WHITING Time for the start of the AGP weekend and my chat with Charlie Whiting; FIA F1 Race Director, Starter and Safety Delegate. This race/season marks the fortieth year in Formula One for Charlie. Congratulations! "Needless to say we re all very happy to be back in Australia. The track is in great shape. We did our inspection earlier, and it looks fabulous. The promoters have done lots of great things. There are lots of new things for the public to see. It s a fan experience. We could see them on our track inspection, near Turns 12 and 13." This race weekend will see a new innovation in the Pit Lane on the F1 Starting Grid - LED Panel Light Boards. There are 22 and each will be operated by a Pit Lane Marshal, who in the past had a yellow flag and a board. Now the Marshal has a control panel with a Green Button and a Yellow Button. The panel illuminates with the driver s name and car number. Once the driver is in position and the Marshal has pushed Green, that panel goes 90 degrees to the wall and the name and number go out. It s like taking the board down. And then that panel is visible to other drivers. When the name and number goes out, then Charlie gets an indication on his control panel that the driver is in position And if anything goes wrong, normally the Marshal would have waved the Yellow Flag; now the Marshal pushes the Yellow Button. And Charlie gets an audible tone, his panel flashes yellow and the driver s light panel flashes yellow. If this is before the start, Charlie aborts the start and there s another Formation Lap. If the Marshal presses the Yellow Button after the Start, which happens sometimes - the driver stalls - then the light panels of all the other driver s behind him flash yellow automatically. This is good for a number of reasons. The main point is you can reorder the board and change things around. And the marshal doesn t have to lean through the fence. The marshal is completely behind the fence. This light panel system was tried last year at Abu Dhabi and worked well. There is updated signage for the F1 drivers pointing to exits. There are a number of ways to do it. F1 Guidelines call for the drivers to know what to look for. Here at AGP it s a little Green Man. In Abu Dhabi last year it was white on green. Regarding the updated flag posts, Charlie said the Australians take their safety seriously very seriously. This year the Virtual Safety Car will be utilized in all free practice sessions. This means instead of Red Flagging for a situation, the Virtual Safety Car procedure will be used and save a lot of time for the drivers, as time lost comes out of the session. The drivers will have to respect the VSC time on their dashboard. VSC won t be used in qualifying. There a situation stops the clock. This year FIA will be more strictly enforcing the driver aids regulations, which means the driver has to do more for himself rather than the engineer via the radio. The drivers can talk to the teams, but the teams are extremely restricted in what they can tell the driver.

2 March 18th 2016 Page 2 Officials Gazette Friday Edition MICHAEL SMITH OUR OFFICIALS Michael Smith, CAMS Secretary of the Meeting, and member of the FIA Commission on Volunteers and Race Officials. This is the twenty-first Melbourne Grand Prix, and there were 11 before that in Adelaide. There are still 29 marshals and race officials who have worked all 32 races. It s a phenomenal effort. It s because of people like that that we have such a good reputation and such a good team. And we re so happy to host marshals from all around the world - eighty this year. And I know many of our marshals go overseas and work other events; and we re very happy that they get the opportunity to do that. CAMS Marshals have been chosen/designated as trainers for six other countries Formula One Grands Prix - Bahrain, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Abu Dhabi, and Russia. And we ve been involved in those events from the ground up. Every year since the FIA has been awarding honors for race officials and volunteers, Australia has won an award - the only country in the world to do so. Last year it was Belinda Taylor, our Assistant National Starter. She s a great ambassador for our sport, and she s a great ambassador for CAMS and for women in motorsports. CAMS heavily promote the idea of nominating marshals for awards - opens up the process for putting names forward. CAMS has an Awards and Honors Committee which gathers and goes through all the nominations and select names for each FIA category, AGP is clearly the biggest motorsport event in the country and is a fantastic recruiting tool. Everyone wants to work a Formula One Grand Prix event. We ve been very fortunate to have good retention of our officials, who come back year after year after year. We ve worked hard to build a team, and now I think people come as much to be with and work with their mates as well as work at a Formula One event. There s no question that having a Formula One event has lifted the standard of marshaling all around the country, and because it s an international event, we have marshals come from all over the country. And of course the standard that we set here trickles down to the other events the officials work. So we ve been very lucky in that regard. Formula One is just another race meeting, so the standards shouldn t differ. They re exactly the same and we try very hard to encourage that throughout circuit racing in Australia.

3 March 18th 2016 Page 3 IT S A KNOCKOUT For 2016, there s been a will-they-won t-they situation with qualifying. A new qualifying format was suggested and the approved starting in Melbourne. It was announced that there will now be a knockout qualifying system. Unlike the old game show, it s not the name of the game. So how does it all work, I hear you ask? Well, that s what the gazette is here for. As it has been for a few years now, qualifying will still be broken up into three sections: Q1, Q2 and Q3. Each segment is now 16, 15 and 14 minutes long. Unlike previous years, though, at the end of each segment seven cars will have been knocked out instead of five. Some of this is due to the additional team and some is so that Q3 will have only eight cars competing for pole position. The big change is that in Q1, after seven minutes have passed, the slowest car will no longer be able to participate in the rest of the session and they will start the race in 22nd position. Then every 90 seconds, another driver is knocked out and their position on the grid set. At the end of the session, the final car is knocked out when all remaining drivers have completed their lap. Q2 follows the same process, with the first driver being knocked out after six minutes, leaving just eight cars to fight for pole. In Q3, the knockouts begin after five minutes and only two drivers will be on track at the end of the session in what is hoped will be a flat-out run to the chequered flag. If there is a red flag, the sessions will have the clock stopped but drivers will still be knocked out when the session restarts. If there is any reason to adjust the length of the session, Q3 will be kept as is and Q1 & Q2 will be altered to suit the requirements. If a driver stops on circuit, they won t be allowed to continue in the qualifying session but they may still survive a few knockout periods if their time is fast enough. It sounds a little complicated, and there is a chance that a driver knocked out could impede someone still running, but it should provide a different and interesting change to the qualifying format. Mostly I feel sorry for the commentators who have to be able to keep track and update viewers as each driver drops off the tail of the session.

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5 MUSTER MEETING March 18th 2016 Page 5 INTERNATIONAL OFFICIALS This year we number more than 950, with 80 coming from overseas. 29 have worked all the AGP s since 1985 in Adelaide. Of the Internationals, here is the breakdown: GAZETTE TWEETS The Officials Gazette has its own Twitter handle and it s being updated frequently during the weekend.

6 March 18th 2016 Page 6 March 18th 2016 Page 6 Officials Gazette Friday Edition SOCIAL MEDIA UPDATE This year, as last, the AGP Officials Gazette is being posted front and center on the CAMS web site ( Give it a look. And if you re into Social Media, the CAMS link is also being spread far and wide - on Twitter (@gpgazette) as well as on eight or more special group Facebook pages. Feel free to like, share or even tell us of other places we can spread the word. At this point the Facebook pages - some public and some invitational groups - are: International Formula One Marshals of the World; Flag Marshals of the World; F-1 Marshal Pics; Corner Workers of the World; SCCA Marshals; SCCA Friends; SCCA SFR; and Racers.