Formula 1 team bosses have welcomed changes to the F1 Sprint format which have made the compacted weekends ‘more forgiving’.
Last weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix played host to the first Sprint race of the F1 season and also gave a first glimpse at a slightly revised format.
Under the new format, Friday’s running consists of a sole Free Practice session followed by the Sprint Shootout before heading into Saturday’s Sprint and Grand Prix qualifying ahead of Sunday’s main race.
The change in format has also opened up parc ferme restrictions allowing teams to make adjustments to car setups between the two Saturday sessions.
“This reopened parc ferme will certainly be used for tuning the balance of the car,” McLaren team boss Andrea Stella said.
“Sometimes, this could be large changes if you see you are significantly off. The possibility to reopen parc ferme after the sprint has two implications.
“The first one is that the weekend is slightly more forgiving. Because if you got some ride heights wrong, or you see that the balance needs adjustments based on the tyre behaviour, for instance, you can do it.
“And this, at the same time, I think allows you to be slightly more aggressive in the first place in terms of what direction to take, or, for instance, in terms of ride heights, because you can compensate,” Stella explained.
“And we actually from a purely engineering point of view found this interesting because we had the opportunity to see the balance in the sprint.
“Obviously, if there were some silver bullets, we would have deployed them already. So, we talked about not much more than some fine-tuning. But it’s interesting from an engineering point of view that you can do it. This change for us is very welcome.”
Aston Martin performance director Tom McCullough discussed some of the options the team faced before even arriving in Shanghai.
“We had a lot of those discussions coming into the event [such as] rear wing level set-up [etc],” McCullough began to explain.
“But ultimately doing a 19-lap [sprint] stint is still hard and you can’t really make too big a change compared to the main race.”
McCullough believes that some of the tweaks made by teams between the Sprint and Grand Prix were greater than those expected at other Sprint events due to an absence of data. Following a hiatus from the calendar, this year’s running of the Chinese Grand Prix was the first since 2019.
“It was maybe bigger here just because we’ve not been here for so long,” McCullough continued.
“The 2019 cars when we were last here had rear ride heights three times the rear ride heights we are running now and the stiffness of the car, everything’s so different the tyres, the aero.
“We all simulated and prepared, [and] the track grip itself was maybe worse – more rear limiting than in the past which I think we kind of predicted just to have these tyres and how the generation of cars are working.
“[Aston] sort of walked where we thought, ‘you get one run [in FP1], bang you make some changes before sprint quali’, but after the sprint race really you learn the most in high fuel long running. A 30-odd-kg long run, you learn.
“And then we were like, ‘Right, what’s going to happen when we put another 70kg of fuel in, which are the tyres we’re gonna have to look after what do we need to do, bang, make some changes’.
“They weren’t big changes, really. Everyone up and down the pit lane would have made [those] changes.”
The biggest midweek turnaround came from Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg who fell from 13th to last in the Sprint Race.
Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu revealed that Hulkenberg’s setup for the Sprint “actually made the car worse”, however a setup change ahead of the Grand Prix saw the German able to salvage a point on Sunday.
The F1 Sprint format will make a return at the Miami Grand Prix this weekend.
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