18/07/2021
NEWS STORY
An enthusiastic Ross Brawn claims he would have been happy to have bought a ticket for the sport's first ever Sprint event.
While the jury is still out, opinion clearly divided, F1 MD and technical boss, Ross Brawn is in no doubt, the Sprint is the best thing to happen to the sport for some time.
Ignoring the fact that the leading three will line up on today's grid in exactly the same order as they did in Bahrain and France - even Styria if you swap the Mercedes pair around - Brawn is convinced that the Sprint is the way forward for the sport.
"One of the things we all saw today is a racing driver is a racing driver," said Brawn in the moments after the event, which was effectively decided by the first corner.. "They're never going to take it easy.
"Lots of actions through the field," he continued. "I mean, that first lap or so was completely nail-biting, sensational. Then we had the little duels in the rest of the race.
"Fernando Alonso's performance today was another sensational part of the race," he added. "He got my vote for the highlight of the race... I'd buy a ticket for that every day.
"I think we're very pleased. We'll let the dust settle on this weekend, and then spend some time with the FIA and the teams trying to understand if there's some evolutions we want. We won't be changing the fundamental format this year. And I think after the three races, we can sit down and decide where we go from here. But so far, very positive.
"We're already getting massive feedback, positive feedback from our fans on social media, they love it," he insisted. "But there will be fans who make some comments, and maybe there's bits they didn't understand, or they didn't appreciate. We'll take that into account as well.
"We need to view the weekend overall," he admitted, "because I don't see anything we've done which takes away from a normal weekend. I think it's all additive. But let's see the whole weekend. Let's see the race. And then at the end of it all, we can do an analysis as you say, talk to the fans, look at all the data and details, and see if there's some tuning we need to do.
"For me, there's some very appealing things about this format, everyone runs the same tyre in qualifying. We still have the variety in the race, because fortunately we had two tyres that you could use.
"There's no handicap on people for the race in terms of what tyres they choose. So that's quite possibly something which you can take forward."
Check out our Sunday gallery from Silverstone, here.