Brawn happy with initial positive reaction for Sprint Quali, open to changes

Ross Brawn was positive after the first Sprint Qualifying running in F1 British GP and noted that the sport is open to changes with the format.

Amid the mixed chorus, the F1 Sprint Qualifying was deemed as a good trial during the British GP weekend, with drivers and teams not too letdown by the happenings. There are still things to be improved, but general consensus was positive.

Talking more about it, Brawn was satisfied by the efforts and felt good with the positive reactions from fans. He added that there will be more scrutiny done in the time to come, to ascertain how much the fans liked it and what all can be improved.

“I think one of the things we all saw is a racing driver is a racing driver,” said Brawn to media after the race. “And they’re never gonna take it easy. So lots of actions through the field. I mean, that first lap or so was completely nail-biting, sensational. Then we had the little duels in the rest of the race.

“Fernando Alonso’s performance was another sensational part of the race. He got my vote for the highlight of the race. I’d buy a ticket for that every day. So I think we’re very pleased. We’ll let the dust settle on this weekend, and then spend some time with the FIA and the teams trying to understand if there’s some evolutions we want.

“We won’t be changing the fundamental format this year. And I think after the three races, we can sit down and decide where we go from here. But so far, very positive. We’re already getting massive feedback, positive feedback from our fans on social media, they love it.

“But there will be fans who make some comments, and maybe there’s bits they didn’t understand, or they didn’t appreciate. We’ll take that into account as well. I think we’ve got to look at the weekend overall. We need to view the weekend overall to see, because I don’t see anything we’ve done which takes away from a normal weekend.

“I think it’s all additive. But let’s see the whole weekend. Let’s see the race. And then at the end of it all, we can do an analysis as you say, talk to the fans, look at all the data and details, and see if there’s some tuning we need to do,” summed up Brawn.

Talking about what he likes, Brawn noted about the tyre aspect, where everyone would run just the one compound in qualifying and in the race, it is a free choice. He, however, acknowledged to criticisms around the ‘pole-sitter’ tag, given to Sprint Qualifying winner.

At this juncture, they will look into how to better represent it and bring changes if required. “For me, there’s some very appealing things this format, everyone runs the same tyre in qualifying,” said Brawn. “We still have the variety in the race, because fortunately we had two tyres that you could use.

“There’s no handicap on people for the race in terms of what tyres they choose. So that’s quite possibly something which you can take forward. As for tagging Saturday winner as pole-sitter, maybe that’s something we need to think about. If there’s some change in the nomenclature of what we’re doing, and should Friday be the pole position?