Hamilton not against shaking up “boring” F1 formats

Lewis Hamilton says he is open to ideas to tweak Formula 1 race weekend formats with a particular focus at circuits where racing is typically “boring” such as the Singapore and Monaco rounds.

During the Singapore Grand Prix, the reigning F1 world champion and Sebastian Vettel blasted the possibility of reverse grid qualifying races in 2020 by calling it “complete bullshit” which led to F1 bosses Chase Carey and Ross Brawn explaining to all F1 drivers about the ideas in the pipeline.

Speaking during the Russian Grand Prix weekend, Hamilton’s opinion appeared to be quelled against tweaking the current F1 race weekend format and supported the move at circuits where overtaking is notoriously limited.

“It’s not particularly my decision to make but I am not opposed to changing the weekend format because, Jesus, it can be very boring, the same format every weekend for 21, 22, 23 races,” Hamilton said. “And on some races like Singapore, where it’s not a good race for actually being able to race, maybe make some adjustments and maybe on that weekend it’s a different format.

“The same with Monaco, it’s not a great race so maybe you do something different.

“I’m absolutely up for that as long as it’s thought about properly and not just shooting in the dark, which a lot of the time these super intelligent people do.”

Asking for his opinion again on the reverse qualifying race idea, Hamilton says he’s uncertain if the format would achieve the intended goal of more exciting racing in F1.

“I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea, but maybe in some places where there’s a massive deficit between first and last, maybe that’s not a bad race if it’s a track where you can actually overtake,” he said. “Would it make it more exciting? I don’t know.”

F1 bosses are currently assessing experiments to race weekend formats for 2020 in order to judge which ideas would be successful for a permanent introduction as part of the wider overhaul of F1 in 2021.