Let’s start with the good news. Formula 1 has expunged one of the worst features of the sprint races it introduced two years ago.
Following a meeting of the teams today, with the first of this year’s six sprint races just four days away, F1 has announced further changes to its rules with a separate ‘Sprint Shootout’ qualifying session being introduced. This will decide the starting order for the sprint race, while the grand prix grid is unaffected and set by a qualifying session held on Friday.
This corrects the flaw in the format which was demonstrated most clearly by the last sprint round, the 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix. On that occasion Haas’s Kevin Magnussen mastered changing conditions in qualifying to perfection, defeating drivers from a string of better-funded teams with faster cars to be fastest in Q3.
His superb performance deserved to be rewarded with the prestige of pole position for the grand prix. However come Sunday’s race that place at the front of the grid was occupied by Mercedes’ George Russell.
He had won the Saturday sprint race which decided the starting order for the grand prix, while Magnussen inevitably sank down the order in his otherwise uncompetitive Haas. He was unlucky to have performed his giant-killing qualifying feat on a sprint race weekend.
While F1 declared Magnussen was the Brazilian GP pole winner, the pole position contradiction was a fault in the sprint race format which was inevitably going to surface at some point. The new sprint rules announced today corrects that.
More broadly, F1’s move to ‘standalone’ sprint races – with the grand prix occupying the two days either side of ‘sprint Saturday’ – can be seen as an implicit acknowledgement that they have not produced a spectacle of sufficient quality to meet the endless, breathless hype bestowed on the new format by the series and its broadcasters.
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While F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali likes to characterise the format’s detractors as mostly “old fans”, the sport’s 25-year-old two-times world champion has proved one of the most trenchant critics of sprint races. Max Verstappen articulated the shortcomings of the format earlier this month.
“For me a sprint race is all about surviving,” he said. “It’s not about racing. For me, when you have a quick car, there’s nothing to risk. I…
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