Unlike today, there was a time when there were so many teams trying to qualify for a Formula One race that pre-qualification was needed. Gabrielle Tarquini has the dubious record of being the driver that failed to pre-qualify the most times. He failed to pre-qualify in 25 races. Pre-qualifying consisted of a 30-minute session at 9am where the new teams of the current year and the worst teams of the previous season had to battle for four slots in qualifying. Most of the times the drivers coming out of pre-qualifying would fail to qualify for the race anyway but at least they made it to Saturday afternoon instead of going home on Friday.
Further down the list of drivers who failed to pre-qualify there are names like Roberto Moreno with 22, Bernd Schneider with 14, Stefan Johansson with eight and even Michele Alboreto with three failed attempts to pre-qualify.
Tags: pre-qualify