We had our first Sprint Qualifying for an official Formula 1 event at the Briitsh Grand Prix 2021. Formula 1 is raving how great it is, the media is pushing this narrative in an attempt to get people to buy into it. Nico Rosberg has criticized the format on his Twitter, saying;
"This is not the right decision. Pole 100% has to go to the fastest guy in qualifying. The sprint race winner should not be awarded pole position. That will totally cannibalise the historic F1 statistics"
Is it a coincidence that Nico Rosberg was not present with Skysport this weekend?
So why is Sprint Qualifying bad for the sport?
Firstly, pole position is about the fastest car and the fastest driver earning the right to start first for the race. It's a deserving reward for the team and driver who has done the best. This is also the only time during the weekend when the car and driver are at the absolute maximum. Everyone wants to see how fast a Formula 1 car can go. How does this year's car compare to last year's car? Which car is now the fastest? Who's the fastest driver? Clawing for every bit of speed available, where hundredths of a second can make a difference. With Sprint Qualifying, that excitement is gone. A car and driver that shines in qualifying, may not carry that same success into the race.... cough... George Russell. But this is an interesting dynamic each weekend. Again this is gone as the Sprint race is still a RACE, and what we see in a 17 lap Sprint will give us clues to what happens in the full Grand Prix.
This brings me to my next point. Sprint Qualifying is a spoiler for the race. Typically the top 10 drivers are forced onto a given tire from what was used in Q2, and then 11-20th have a choice to really mix it up. This adds an element of 'what if' to each Grand Prix. After Silverstone Sprint Qualifying, we now know the Soft tire is rubbish for the race, and the only choices to use will be Medium and Hard. One must expect most teams will go with the exact same strategy. We also know the tires blister very quickly when pushed hard, so expect everyone in the race to save tires. Without the Sprint Race, this information would have been discovered during the Grand Prix, and we could have seen teams deal with that challenge in real time. That surprise is gone. We also know who the top 3 drivers are. VER - HAM - BOT, or HAM - VER - BOT is almost a guarantee unless something dramatic happens. We also know that only the Mercedes powered cars can really pass on the straight. All the questions we have after qualifying and anticipate for Sunday's Grand Prix have already been answered to a certain degree.
Lastly, in modern Formula 1, the cars CAN NOT PASS! The idea of a RACE to set the Grid order makes absolutely no sense. Since the cars can't pass, once the Sprint Race has settled down after the first few laps, don't expect much to change. How is that more exciting than proper Qualifying that can change constantly? The Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton appear to be the strongest package at Silverstone, but once Verstappen got into the lead, Lewis could not advance and settled for 2nd. Hamilton earned his pole position on Saturday.
George Russell also deserved his 8th place position, only to drop back 1 place, then gets a deserving 3 place grid penalty for bumping into Sainz which ruined his Sprint Race and hurt his grid position. The chance of a driver's Sunday race being ruined by someone else's mistake in the Sprint Race, is extremely high. This is unfair and the risk of this happening increases exponentially if start in the mid field.
Let's not forget about the budget cap. If Sprint Qualifying continues, there WILL be crashes, and that can be very expensive to repair. In the budget cap era, that can be detrimental to a team, and once again it is the mid field teams that are most likely to be affected, so the chances of them closing the gap to the top teams becomes even less likely.
In the generation we live in with the huge following of Instagram and TikTok, people enjoy artificial entertainment. This is exactly what Sprint Qualifying is. People are more and more likely to only focus on what they see in the moment, and tend to agree with what the media likes to portray. As long as some see something different as new and exciting, and as long as the media pushes Sprint Qualifying as a success, it will be here to stay. Unfortunately that comes at the cost of diluting what a pole position is worth, and the fabric of Formula 1 history will start to change. Decades of the pole position going to the fastest car and driver, that will no likely be represented the same way.
There are many things wrong in Formula 1, but Qualifying was not one of them.
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