General
F1 wants to experiment with new racing formats this season
- GPblog.com
Because of the corona pandemic, Formula 1 looked at a lot of alternative options to fill race weekends. For example, a shortened race weekend was discussed, but also thought was given to racing with a reverse grid. In the end the coming season will take place in the usual way, but that doesn't rule out experiments.
Reverse grid
A race on Saturday where the result determines the starting grid on Sunday is an idea that has been suggested several times. This also happened at Liberty Media and was presented to the teams. However, this will not be a format that will actually be applied, because not every team will like it.
So says Chase Carey at Formula1.com: "We’ve had one [idea] that’s been publicised about a reverse grid [race on Saturday to determine the grid for Sunday] that not all teams were comfortable with. Making changes in this short timeframe requires unanimity of support. We’re changing almost real time inside the season, but we’ll continue to look at ideas."
No gimmicks
In order to avoid races that would not do honour to the sport, it is necessary to think carefully about which concepts can and cannot be used. "We want to make sure they’re not gimmicks. It’s a great sport with great history, great heroes, great stars, incredibly talented drivers and other individuals so we want to respect everything."
"But we want to make sure that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t look at ways to make some changes. To some degree, this season being unique gives a little bit more opportunity to try something that I don’t think we would do unless we thought it was a real possibility to add something to the race.”
"I think we always want to be challenging ourselves and [looking at whether] there other things we can do to make the sport better."