25/04/2023
NEWS STORY
Ahead of the first Sprint of the season, Haas boss, Guenther Steiner believes that in time half the races on the calendar will feature the 'mini races'.
A week ahead of the Baku weekend, the sport has yet to officially announce a revised format which will likely see Saturday given over entirely to Sprints, with qualifying in the morning and the race later in the day.
Friday would see one practice session in the morning, while the afternoon session would be given over for qualifying for Sunday's Grand Prix.
As can be seen with the ongoing predilection for restarts, F1 realises that the start of races, along with qualifying, are the two main highlights of the weekend, consequently, what better way of attracting the fans and sponsors than doubling the number of both.
With MotoGP having introduced Sprints at every round, Steiner believes that increasing the number of Sprint events in F1 from the current six is the way forward.
"I don't know if we will do it every race weekend," he told Reuters. "Maybe do a few more or maybe do half of the calendar. The F1 promoter will know what to do.
"At the moment there is more demand for races (than slots available) so how can you get more races in, more competition, more racing if we cannot do more than 24 events... just make the event double count."
However, the Haas boss admits that at some tracks there will be a need for more than the one practice session that will be available in Baku.
"The FP3 session on Saturday morning became almost worthless because nobody was watching it, the teams couldn't do any changes on the car except trying the tyre out for the race so there was no real interest," he said. "So I think that is a good addition to the weekend to put a sprint qualifying in.
"You have to see how it works with the fans, if they like it, how the numbers come back and then decide what to do as the next step. But at the moment I support very much the sprint qualifying."