Zilvinas Oskutis is a professional race car driver who began his professional career in 2002 at the CIK-FIA European ICC Championship, where he placed 10th. He’s now owner of the EuropaKarting Racing school in Europe.
Formula One Racing is an automobile racing event that takes place over 3 days
The first day is reserved for practice rounds, during which the racers get familiar with the track layout, track conditions, weather in the race location, and how their cars are performing. Racers also take this opportunity to adjust any of the hundreds of adjustable features on their race cars to get them to perform at maximum effectiveness for that particular race track.
Day two are qualifying rounds during which racers try to acheive a single-lap time that allows them to start in the actual race. The qualifying session is also used to determine starting positions for race day; the driver with the best qualifying time gets the #1 position (also known as the “pole position”), the driver with the second best qualifying time gets the #2 position and so on. A total of 26 cars will qualify for the actual race, which means quite a few do not have fast enough times to compete on race day.
Over time, the total number of cars to enter the world championship dropped below 26, which means that no matter how slow any particular car was driven, all cars would qualify for the race. In order to prevent this from happening, 1996 saw the introduction of the 107% rule. The 107% rule basically says that if any car’s best qualifying lap time was not within 107% of the leader’s qualifying time, they would not qualify for the race. The 107% rule has been dropped and picked up a couple times by race authorities and was most recently re-introduced for the 2011 season. As it stands now, all cars must be within 107% of the best qualifying round 1 time in order to qualify for the race.