Quote:
Originally Posted by bjohnsonsmith
Toto Wolff is spot on with his comments.
"I'd rather have no sprint races than if you start to meddle. Even more with reverse grid races, we are going towards junior formulae where sport follows entertainment, while entertainment should follow sport.
Creating artificial gaming around the sprint race on a Saturday is not the way that I would favour personally.But that's my opinion.''
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I am of two minds on this and could be convinced either way...
(A). Racing rules are arbitrary already. Racing is a game. It is made up. So things like reverse grids is just an alternative way of playing a game. Who is to say that this is "sport follows entertainment". There are already a multitude of rules that exist today to generally "balance the field" in an attempt to decrease domination (boring seasons) and increase the entertainment value (more teams/drivers fighting at the front). Another phrase for "entertainment" or "entertainment value" could be called "good racing". Then again, not everyone agrees as to what is "good racing". Some want to see various teams trading wins back and forth over a season. Others are perfectly fine with one team absolutely dominating as it just showed they are performing at a level above the rest. The problem is there is no wrong answer.
(B) Ditch the sprint races all together. Stop trying to "fix" sprint races and focus on the effort to "fix" the primary GP event. Improve the the "entertainment" value of the GP. I mean they are trying this already, but stop also trying to band-aid on the sprint races as part of that. Also as called out in posts above mine, the season is pretty long, so throwing in more sprint races can create a level of "race fatigue". With more and more races, each one becomes less important and special. So you can start to care less about them. For example I was busy this weekend and just didn't watch the sprint race at all, but did watch the Sunday GP.
I know most here would say this is dumb, but part of me REALLY wants to see reverse grid sprint races.
I suspect if it was done, the stragglers at the slow end of qualifying would be quickly passed and then it would be a progression of the fast cars working to the front. But that assumes a large performance difference as it is today. If there was more performance parity, there would be no need to invert grids to create entertainment.
Richard