It’s a question where the answer is redefined every year, but with the 2024 Formula 1 Chinese Grand Prix looming, it is important to discuss just how F1 Sprints work.
At Shanghai this weekend, Friday morning practice will be followed by qualifying for the Sprint on Friday afternoon with Saturday starting with the Sprint itself, followed by GP qualifying in the afternoon and the main event on Sunday.
This is the latest in a series of revisions since the format debuted three years ago.
Sprints made their bow in 2021 on three GP weekends, one at Silverstone, another at Monza and a third at Sao Paulo.
Originally the format saw a practice session run on Friday morning before a standard format qualifying session on Friday afternoon to set the grid for the Sprint from which point cars entered Parc Ferme conditions.
A second practice session followed on Saturday morning before the 100km Sprint race on Saturday afternoon, with points awarded to the top three on a scale of 3-2-1, the final order setting the grid for Sunday’s GP and the winner receiving the accolade of pole position.
In 2022 the format changed to offer a greater chance of scoring points with the top eight being awarded in the fashion of 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.
The result continued to set the grid for the Grand Prix, but Pole Position was now awarded to the driver fastest in Friday’s qualifying session.
Sprints in 2022 were run at Imola, the Red Bull Ring and Sao Paulo, but several critiques needed addressing, not least the largely redundant second practice session run on Saturday mornings.
So in 2023 the format was changed for the third straight year and tested across six venues instead of three: Baku, the Red Bull Ring, Spa-Francorchamps, Qatar, Circuit of the Americas and Sao Paulo.
It had become clear that circuit selection for the most part was an important factor in making sure Sprints delivered with the likes of the Red Bull Ring and Sao Paulo, two circuits where overtaking is easier than usual, becoming mainstays in the Sprint roster.
Furthermore, it was clear that there were barriers preventing drivers from pushing in Sprints for fear of jeopardising their Grand Prix chances.
The first change to mitigate this was to offer more points in 2022, but the risk of a poor result landing you a terrible grid slot for the GP still wasn’t worth it for the drivers.
So, in 2023, FP1 was followed by Qualifying for Sunday’s Grand Prix on Friday afternoon.
Then Saturday saw a second qualifying session introduced, the Sprint Shootout, which set the grid for Saturday afternoon’s Sprint where the points scoring remained the same but now the result no longer had an impact on the GP thanks to Friday’s qualifying session.
The Sprint Shootout was no ordinary qualifying session however as hard compound tyres were mandated for the 12-minute SQ1 session (down from the usual 18 minutes in an ordinary Q1 session), medium tyres were mandated for a 10-minute SQ2 session and soft tyres were mandated for an eight-minute SQ3 session.
In the eyes of Formula One Management, an ideal solution had been found with competitive sessions on each day of GP weekend to entice audiences and the jeopardy of the Sprint result no longer affecting a driver’s GP starting position.
However, some drivers would rather have more practice time than an extra bout of qualifying to prepare for the weekend ahead and the likes of the smaller teams, who often have little chance of breaking into the top eight saw little point in competing in the Sprint when a reward was seldom received.
“Well, this is such a s**t format,” said Alex Albon via his team radio after finishing ninth in the Baku Sprint last year.
“Top 8 are the top 4 teams. It’s boring.”
Max Verstappen was particularly scathing when asked to comment on the format in Azerbaijan last spring.
“Just scrap the whole thing,” he said.
“I think it’s just important to go back to what we have, and make sure that every team can fight for a win, that’s what we have to try and aim for and [not] try to implement all this kind of artificial excitement.”
Sergio Perez gave a more balanced view at the time, saying “I’m happy if we have three, four races like this, with the sprint format, and just making sure we correct small details like the timing, like the usage of the tyre. I think it looked really bad to have, I think, two cars without tyres in Q3. Just to make sure that we correct for that. And then you just have a few races like this in the year, maximum.”
There was also the issue of Parc Ferme locking teams into a car set-up after just an hour of practice on Friday mornings.
This came to haunt the likes of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton in Austin, Texas last Autumn, who were disqualified after post-race scrutineering found excessive plank wear on each of their cars.
Had parc ferme been reopened between the Sprint and Grand Prix sessions, Ferrari and Mercedes would likely have prevented such an issue from occurring.
“We’ve never had that problem in Austin before, it’s just that we had a sprint race this time,” Hamilton said following his disqualification.
“An easy fix for that one [is] just [to] approach the weekend differently where the car is not set from Friday morning, especially at the bumpiest track we have been to.”
Formula 1 has its heart set on making Sprints a success, despite the criticisms of drivers, especially World Champion Verstappen.
As a result, the ever-evolving format has seen changes occur in 2024 in response to drivers’ concerns.
By moving Sprint qualifying to Friday afternoon (with medium tyres now mandatory in SQ1 and SQ2, and soft mandatory in SQ3) and the Sprint to Saturday morning, F1 has allowed for two parce ferme periods.
Parc ferme will be put in place initially to cover the two Sprint sessions following Friday morning practice, before reopening ahead of GP qualifying on Saturday afternoon to allow teams to make further changes.
It’s now time to see how the revised format plays out in Shanghai this weekend and at the five other Sprint weekends of the year: Miami (03-05 May), Red Bull Ring (28-30 June), COTA (18-20 October), Sao Paulo (01-03 November) and Qatar (29 November-01 December).
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