Flavio Briatore advocates for a further expansion of the sprint calendar in Formula 1. The Alpine senior advisor and former team principal believes that the premier class should offer the audience more spectacle and would therefore like to introduce a sprint race as standard. According to the Italian, this is a logical next step now that the sport’s popularity continues to grow.
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Briatore, who looked ahead to the future of the sport in an interview with The Race, aligns himself with the course of Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali. The latter previously flirted with the idea of expanding the sprint calendar from six to ten editions per year. However, the Alpine boss wants to go a step further. “If we continue like this, Formula 1 will keep growing,” assured Briatore. “I don’t know how big this growth will be in the future, but it will continue. That’s why we also need to change the races a bit.”
Flavio Briatore wants to offer fans ‘something extra’
According to Briatore, the current format on some weekends is still too sparse for the fans present. “I think we need more sprint races,” he explained. “If it were up to me, I would organize them every weekend, because we need to offer the spectators something extra. There are still weekends where we do not sufficiently serve the fans,” the Italian noted. “For example, Friday morning is entirely dedicated to technical tests. You do a lap on the track, return to the pits, and that’s it. Only on Saturday is the qualifying held and on Sunday the race, and then the weekend is already over. Only during those sessions do the drivers race for more than just the engineers.”
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According to Briatore, the growing interest from the public shows that Formula 1 is on the right track and that there is room to further develop the race weekend. “When I arrived in Silverstone this year on Thursday, the crowd was just as large as during the races seven years ago; we have never seen so many people on a Thursday. Ten years ago it was dead silent on Thursday and only a few people showed up on Friday. Now there were already a huge number of fans on Thursday, maybe twenty or thirty thousand.”
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