12 Red Flags During Qualifying Confound Stewards at Macau Grand Prix

The Macau Grand Prix is a unique event for two reasons. First, the Formula Regional race that anchors the weekend is a rare major event meant only for young drivers on their way up the racing ladder; second, and most importantly, it is held on what is likely the most narrow major racing circuit in the world. Add those two things together and you get chaos — and qualifying sessions for this year's race led to more chaos than even the race's stewards anticipated.

Autosport reports that drivers have been been summoned for an additional, previously-unscheduled briefing with race officials after two sessions of qualifying. Why was the conversation necessary? Well, drivers combined to cause 12 red flags over just two 40-minute qualifying sessions.

In the first session, the crashing could be attributed to a wet track. That's no big deal; Formula 1 drivers crash often in wet qualifying sessions too. The more unusual struggles were in the second session. Since it marked the first dry running for competitors of the weekend, drivers did their best to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Many incidents followed; in fact the seven red flags in the dry session beat out the five red flags tallied in the wet qualifying session the day before.

Ugo Ugochukwu, an American driver who has been in the McLaren system development driver since he was 13, led the second qualifying session over Red Bull's Oliver Goethe. A qualifying race is set for Saturday, then the field of Formula Regional drivers will fight on Sunday to join Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna as winners of the feature race.

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