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After throwing the stone (of the Sprint Race) F1 hides its hand and returns - partially - to the past. In fact, in the 2024 World Championship, the format that, last season, occupied the six weekends that included it, will change to an entirely dedicated Saturday, with qualifying in the morning and the Sprint Race in the afternoon.
The F1 Commission has in fact decided that qualifying for the sprint will follow free practice on Friday, with the race scheduled for Saturday morning. On the contrary, qualifying for the Grand Prix will return to the classic positioning on Saturday afternoon, 24 hours before the GP.
Like last year, this season too there will be six sprint races, in China, Miami, Austria, Austin, Brazil and Qatar. However, it will be up to the World Motorsport Council, scheduled for February 28th, to ratify the changes to be implemented for the season starting on March 2nd in Bahrain.
It is not yet known what reasons led to the change, but one is understandable: the fight for pole position has always been one of the key moments of the Grands Prix, one of the most followed.
Now, moving from four to two wheels, we can easily observe that in MotoGP, where with instead of just six there will be 21 Sprint Races, the interest in pole position is virtually reduced to zero: who's talking about it if the Sprint race is already on Saturday afternoon?
What’s more, pole in MotoGP applies to both the Sprint and the Grand Prix, giving it extra importance because if you get it wrong you also compromise the long race. Isn't it about time we changed it?
We have said it several times: paying homage to Pay TV with an extra race, to attract a greater television audience, can be done, but doing so for the entire championship is a damage which also reduces the expectations, after the pole, for the outcome of the Grand Prix, which is often a long version of the Sprint, with the form factor already revealed.
This is without mentioning the incredible stress to which the entire paddock is subjected, starting from the mechanics, while as far as the riders are concerned, the fact that last year there was not one single Grand Prix with all the starters on the grid, speaks for itself: double the starts, double the risks. We are not on four wheels; on motorbikes you crash and get hurt.
Well, copying F1 is nonsense, because even though they both have an engine in the middle, single-seaters and MotoGP are very different vehicles, with different audiences. On the one hand there is glamour, with a VIP audience sipping champagne during the race talking about the latest show of Valentino (Garavani), on the other there’s a wild bunch defying the laws of physics.
We can change, but not only that: we must. Otherwise, a repetition of what happened in 2023 will be inevitable and it would be pointless for the teams to equip themselves with a third or fourth rider: we are not talking about football teams where it’s the shirt that counts. In MotoGP the interest is on the individual rider!
Making racehorses compete too much wears them out, and this goes for humans too. So, this time we should also copy F1, giving the right attention to pole, and then we reduce the number of Sprint races. As a selection criterion, we should adopt that of the circuits in which the first corner is not a funnel too close to the start, to avoid what has too often happened in the recent past with catastrophic pileups.
