Only 17 cars will line up on the grid for today’s sprint race as three drivers have chosen to start from the pit lane.
The trio are taking advantage of the opportunity to change their car’s set-ups before the race.All three drivers were eliminated in the first round of qualifying for the sprint race yesterday. Fernando Alonso will give up 16th on the grid, while Lance Stroll and Zhou Guanyu qualified on the back row.
The FIA confirmed Aston Martin have changed the bodywork specification and suspension set-ups on their drivers’ cars. The team reverted to an earlier version of its floor this weekend in a bid to get on top of the handling problems both drivers have complained about in recent races.
Alonso said yesterday the team intended to treat today’s 24-lap race like a practice session, echoing his remarks from the previous sprint event in Austin.
Sauber has also made changes to the suspension set-up of Zhou’s car. He was unable to complete his final run in qualifying as his team sent him out too late and the chequered flag had fallen by the time he reached the timing line. His team mate Valtteri Bottas reached the second round of qualifying and will start 15th.
The drivers’ penalties will promote Esteban Ocon to 16th on the grid ahead of Yuki Tsunoda.
F1 changed its sprint event regulations this year by moving the extra race to the first session slot on Saturday, before qualifying for the grand prix, and allowing teams to change their cars’ set-up between the two. However teams appear to be increasingly willing to forfeit poor starting position on the sprint race grid in order to test set-up changes to their car before committing to them for qualifying.
Today’s race is the fifth of six sprint races this year. Of these, only the first in Shanghai saw all 20 cars take the start from the grid.
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Roger Ayles (@roger-ayles)
2nd November 2024, 13:18
Whatever one thinks of the sprint format I think it’s pretty obvious that nobody really cares all that much about the sprint itself.
The drivers don’t really seem to care about them & don’t really celebrate sprint poles or wins or even talk about doing well in them.
And teams clearly just see them as more of a practice session but in race conditions which gives them a lot more representative race data.
The whole concept just doesn’t really seem to be adding all that much & I don’t know if Keith has any actual data on this but it always feels like this site is quieter on the sprint weekends & it feels like social media in general as well as other sites I go on are the same. And we have also seen that the sprint races get much lower TV ratings so it just feels like the format isn’t really working in terms of driving engagement on Friday or Saturday as it seems like fewer people are talking about F1 when compared to normal weekends and again ratings haven’t been that good either from what i’ve seen.
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
2nd November 2024, 17:06
Yes, lots less comments for sure on sprint days than actual race days.
t1redmonkey (@t1redmonkey)
2nd November 2024, 13:25
My instant reaction to reading the first few words of the headline was a few drivers had decided to boycott the format and not start the sprint race, lol. But I guess AM are doing what Alonso suggested they’d do, and are basically just treating it as an extra practice session to try out some stuff. And makes sense with Zhou if they messed up his setup (though he obviously wasn’t going to score points either way).
Jonathan Parkin
2nd November 2024, 13:31
Even so it’s not a good look that out of 5 sprints so far this year, only the first one had no pitlane starters
Esploratore (@esploratore1)
2nd November 2024, 17:08
Yes, but it’s a reflection of the points situation: hamilton had a bad start, dropped down to 14th and wasn’t able to make it back into the points, if a driver with the 4th best car here imo can’t make it into the points from 14th, what’s the point starting for anyone who’s 15th or further down?
Can use it as a test session, so agree with alonso’s decision.
If I were him, I’d actually do 12 laps on a set of tyres, 12 on another, to compare their performance.
lynn-m
2nd November 2024, 18:39
It’s a reflection of how utterly pointless these awful gimmick race weekends are.
As somebody above says nobody takes them that seriously, nobody celebrates or raves about doing well in them and nobody sees winning one as an actual race win.
They are just utterly pointless gimmicks that serve no purpose & should be scrapped, i mean hardly anybody watches them to begin with. I saw a stat last year that Verstappen’s championship win in the Qatar sprint race last year was the least watched championship deciding ‘race’ on record….. So yeah they are great for the sport if they make people not want to tune in.