Saturday: Second practice and second qualifying Raikkonen was the last winner of a two-part qualifying session Friday: First practice and first qualifying Would it work? Only if F1 ensures the reward for the sprint championship is high enough for the teams and drivers to want to take part, and not simply park their cars to preserve engine mileage for the main event. These could include elimination races, rolling starts, reverse grids, time trials and more. This would create extra freedom for F1 to experiment with imaginative changes to the rules and format in its Saturday races without fear of affecting the integrity of its main championship. By creating a separate ‘sprint championship’, Saturday’s running wouldn’t interfere with the world championship. For those near the front, the danger of dropping to the back of the grid due to a risky move is too great, and they tend to play it conservatively.Ī simple solution therefore would be to make the Saturday races entirely stand-alone affairs. While F1 claimed this would incentivise drivers to push flat-out and try to gain positions, the reality has largely been different. The key flaw with the current sprint format is that the finishing positions of the Saturday race are used to decide the starting order for the grand prix. Saturday: Second practice and sprint race NASCAR holds non-championship exhibition races Friday: First practice and qualifying Is there a way F1 can enjoy the best of all worlds? Can it keep the added interest of more competitive sessions while removing the contradictions, inconsistencies and unfairness of sprint races – and do all that while respecting the championship’s traditions and devising a format which can be used week-in, week-out instead of only six times per year? Here are three suggestions how it might.Īdvert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free No wonder some team principals are publicly suggesting ways to fix the flawed format. It’s also been noted that the sprint format is unsuitable for use at some tracks where overtaking is extremely difficult, notably Monaco. Once that happens, F1’s insistence that its short races do not detract from the importance and prestige of a grand prix will be shattered. Then there’s the lingering possibility that the points dished out in Saturday’s sprint race could decide the winner of a championship. As both of this year’s sprint races have been won from pole the absurdity of this arrangement hasn’t been put to the test, though it is surely only a matter of time. But the possibility remains that a sprint race could produce a result that means a different driver starts from the front for the grand prix. Trying to get around that, F1 has this year claimed that the official pole position at sprint events is won on Friday in the regular qualifying session. Not least the fact that using a race instead of a qualifying session to decide pole position for a grand prix ended a tradition which began at the first ever round of the world championship in 1950. Report: “We should stick to one race”: F1 drivers not relishing final sprint round of 2022But F1 has not been able to solve the knock-on problems its sprint format created which have irked so many fans. From that point of view, its appeal is obvious: a larger audience ultimately means more income. In effect, it exchanges one practice session for a race, which inevitably creates more interest. An official survey of 167,000 fans found only a small majority considered the format an improvement over the usual arrangement, and other ideas such as permitting multiple tyre suppliers were far more popular.įor F1, the sprint format is attractive because it increases the attention of viewers over a race weekend. At sprint rounds the usual qualifying session is held a day early, on Friday, which decides the starting order for a points-paying, 100-kilometre sprint race on Saturday, which in turn sets the grid for the grand prix.į1 desperately tried to proclaim last year’s trial was wildly successful despite their own research indicating otherwise. The sprint format was introduced as a three-round trial in 2021 after several unsuccessful attempts to win support for the idea. This weekend’s sprint round will be the sixth since they were introduced last year – and the 2023 F1 calendar will feature six more.
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