Mercedes ponder new sprint format: “Unusual, crash risk, tricky for engineers”
Confirmation of the new format and rules were only agreed upon on Tuesday this week, three days before cars hit the track in Baku.
Mercedes Sporting Director Ron Meadows said: "The most notable change is the removal of Free Practice Two from the weekend timetable. That has been replaced with a session called the Sprint Shootout.
"This will set the grid for the F1 Sprint later that day and ensures that Saturday is completely dedicated to this format. Qualifying on Friday will therefore determine the starting order for the Grand Prix on Sunday."
"The Sprint Shootout will essentially be a condensed version of traditional qualifying, but with some notable differences. SQ1 will last 12 minutes, SQ2 10 minutes, and SQ3 just 8 minutes. Drivers will be limited to using one set of the medium tyre in SQ1, another set in SQ2, and one set of the soft compound for SQ3.”
But will this new schedule cause havoc within the garages?
Meadows said: “The new format won't cause massive changes to how the garage personnel operate over the weekend.
“However, when you add sessions that require 100 percent attack from the drivers and every lap matters to advance through to the next stage, you always run the risk of a crash.
“It will be very tricky for the engineers and drivers to find the optimum set-up for both qualifying and heavy race fuel trim.
“We will need to maximise the number of laps in FP1, so we likely won't be planning on making set-up changes that sap running time for the drivers.
“It's a new way of working for all the teams and provides a fair amount of opportunity to excel."
Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin added: "The drivers will go straight into a qualifying session on Saturday, which is very unusual.
“It's a tall order to expect the drivers to deliver a single-lap performance immediately so I suspect everyone will go for multi-lap runs.
“The medium tyre can handle multiple laps but without having several sets available, there's a higher chance of getting unlucky with a red flag for example. I think everyone will get out on track and get busy trying to put laps in.
"It's been interesting as we didn't actually know the format until Tuesday as the rules were voted on at the F1 Commission meeting.”
How did Mercedes prepare for a format which wasn’t even agreed upon until this week?
“We looked at three eventualities that may have happened and prepared tyre and run plans for all of those,” Shovlin said.
"When you've only got FP1, it's practically impossible to condense all the usual learnings across Friday and Saturday into one session.
“You lose the opportunity to focus on the long run and you've got to think about what the real priorities are.
“It's our job to take any set of regulations and optimise for them. With a lack of information there's an opportunity to learn more quickly and do a better job. That's what the team is focused on."
James was a sports journalist at Sky Sports for a decade covering everything from American sports, to football, to F1.
