Okay, here’s a crackpot idea I’ve been thinking about.
Quali for the sprint on Friday.
Practice Saturday AM Sprint Saturday afternoon, but it’s not a race. Your quali sets your order to go out for 1 lap qualifying (fastest goes last) which sets Sunday’s grid Sunday GP
It’s rooted in my opinion that the only good part of the sprint is the extra quali session, which has been pretty exciting and turns into a 1 lap session in SQ3 anyway. It isn’t 2 races, but it’s action all 3 days
My issue with one lap qualifying with the fastest going last would be that during a quali like we’ve had this weekend, if you go last, you’re screwed because suddenly the track is wet or you even get a red flag. Imo it’s much more entertaining when everyone tries to poker with when they do their laps.
Any talk other than abolishing the sprint format is a waste of time
Fia going to keep trying to make this thing work, but there really isn’t a good time for squeezing in more racing. If they move sprint race to Saturday before, and something happens that prevents teams from running qualifying, there will be hell complaints .
I quite like the sprint, so my rather boring opinion is to move the qualifying to Saturday afternoon, then slide the sprint race and it’s qualifying forward a slot. I would then have Parc Ferme kick in at qualifying at the some time as a normal weekend.
This would mean teams can and will play around with setup over the sprint quali and race, but I’m ok with that given the smaller point allocation. Also neither the qualifying or the sprint itself are necessarily ideal places to be playing around with setup too much, especially since no one pits in the sprint, so doing too much setup change might be a risk for a team. It does mean those that got it terribly wrong after FP1 can gamble on some setup changes however. Ultimately coming out of the sprint you’d still need a car fit to go through the GPs qualifying and race, so there’s still that to balance things a bit.
The reverse grid suggestion is interesting, but I’m not sure how it’ll work in practice and perhaps it needs to be a longer race then to allow more time to come through the field. If teams feel the sprint is too high risk already, I can’t see the top teams wanting to now come through a field every sprint session. If they’re going to do this they need to pick tracks with high overtaking rates.
As today’s sprint and a couple others this season show, the sprint can be a good show. The shorter duration reduces the effects of tire degradation on the racing, keeps the field bunched up and makes for more passing and extended duels, instead of on the full-length race where teams are playing a longer strategy game rather than fighting to hold position on the track, and smaller performance differences between the cars accumulate over time to spread the field out.
However, I think F1 needs to either make changes to maintain that level of intensity throughout the longer race distance (i.e., longer lasting tires that won’t melt from agressive attacking or defending maneuvers, allow refueling to reduce weight at the start of the race, tighten up the rules more towards a spec series to keep car performance closer together) or accept that F1 is a different kind of racing from NASCAR or IndyCar, with a more tactical and cerebral presentation. Teams don’t particularly like the sprint format and it takes away from the quality of the main event due to lost practice sessions.
They’ll never reallow refueling during the race, it’s much, much too dangerous for everyone involved.
I hope F1 never gets close to being a spec series (there are tight regulations obviously, but not many parts are spec. A big part of F1, for me at least, is car development.
I agree, but in general it’s very hard to achieve close racing while also allowing broad freedom to engineer your car, particularly in a formula that is so aero-dependent. CFD and wind tunnel time is ruinously expensive, and the more permissive the regs are the larger the problem space you need to explore to find the fastest car design. Consequently, it’s easier for a well-heeled team to just outspend everybody else to optimize their car into victory (see Merc until '21 and Red Bull since the new formula began).
WEC is having some luck with its “downforce design quota” approach, but even so they can’t get really close racing over an endurance race without BoP adjustments, which is something I don’t think the teams will countenance.
