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Preparing your Formula Dream journey
Across two seasons of dry qualifying, the same driver in the same car was 0.825% faster in Q3 than in Q1. On a 90 second lap that is about three quarters of a second.
Nothing on the car got better. It is the same machine, forty-five minutes later.
At Monaco in 2026 the improvement was 1.965%, the largest of any session we measured.
For every qualifying session we took the drivers who set a time in both Q1 and Q3, and compared each driver against themselves. Same car, same afternoon, same driver. That gives 322 driver-events across 2025 and 2026 to date.
One session had to go. Las Vegas 2025 returned a 4.729% improvement, five times the typical figure. It was the only wet qualifying session in the window, so that number describes a drying track rather than a session getting quicker. It is excluded and the reason is worth stating, because a figure that large would have made a much better headline than an honest one.
The improvement is not evenly spread across the session.
More than half the gain has already happened by the end of Q2. The track improves fastest when it is at its dirtiest, which is exactly what you would expect from rubber being laid down: the first cars to run make the biggest difference to the surface.
And it is almost universal. 94.1% of drivers were quicker in Q3 than in Q1.
The minority who went slower generally had a scruffy final run, a mistake, or traffic. There is no group of drivers who systematically fail to improve.
It is tempting to label the whole 0.825% as "track evolution". It is not, and the distinction matters.
Four things are happening at once, and lap times cannot separate them:
So the honest description is that a qualifying session gets 0.825% quicker, and track evolution is the biggest reason but not the only one. Anyone quoting this figure as pure track evolution is overstating it.
Monaco tops both seasons. It is the clearest case in the sport: a street circuit that spends fifty-one weeks a year as a public road, dusty and slippery when the cars arrive, transformed by the time Q3 starts. If you have ever wondered why Monaco qualifying is worth watching from the first lap of Q1, this is the number.
Street circuits do not all behave this way, though. Baku returned 0.205% and Jeddah 0.297%, both near the bottom. Those are fast street circuits with long straights where a large share of the lap does not depend on grip at all. Monaco is not slow because it is a street circuit, it is dramatic because it is a street circuit with almost nothing but corners.
Hungary 2025 at 0.024% is the flat outlier, essentially no improvement across the whole session. The same circuit returned 1.378% in 2026. We are not going to invent an explanation for a single session, but it is a useful reminder that these figures move with conditions on the day.
A Q1 time is not a slow version of a Q3 time. The whole field is close to a second off the pace it will eventually show, and the gap between segments is bigger than the gap between most team-mates.
Running order matters, especially early. In Q1 the track is improving underneath the session. Going out first is a real disadvantage on a circuit that evolves, which is why you see teams hesitate at the end of the pit lane.
Watch Monaco Q1 properly. Two percent of a Monaco lap is well over a second, and it arrives during the session.
Do not read too much into a Q1 gap. Some of the field is not trying, and the track underneath them is changing.
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Qualifying times drop across the session, and you can watch each driver find it.
The Formula Dream app runs a live Dashboard through every session: every car moving on the circuit map, and a timing tower with lap times, gaps and intervals, tyre compound and age, pit counts and positions gained or lost. It is the same information these measurements come from, arriving live. You also get live driver radio as it is broadcast, and every FIA document of the weekend as it is published.
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Russell took the lead at turn one and crashed at the final corner of the same lap. Verstappen won, Hamilton charged to second, and the McLarens hit each other.
