After a dull and uneventful sprint weekend in Austin F1 looking at ideas for a sprint format revamp

After an uneventful and dull affair at the 2023 US Grand Prix, F1 is looking to shake up the sprint weekends heading into the 2024 season.

The sport hosted its fifth Sprint weekend of the season, and for the first time, it was back-to-back, as previously it was held in Qatar at the beginning of October. This time, however, the race was boring from start to finish, as it did not provide entertainment from start to finish.

Max Verstappen raced home to another comfortable win in the Sprint race as he took the chequered flag around eight seconds ahead of second-placed Lewis Hamilton.

As per Autosport, owing to the lack of interest from the fans on and off the track in the sprint weekend, F1 is considering radically changing the format of the sprint weekends.

They do want to continue holding the sprint weekends in the future and are open to new ideas to improve the format.

It is being reported that one of the ideas floating around in the paddock involved turning the Saturdays into a standalone F1 Sprint championship, so any points earned on a Saturday do not count for the main championships.

F1 team bosses give their take on the Sprint weekends

Red Bull Team Principal Christain Horner said that he was in favor of changing formats and experimenting on the Sprint weekends to bring in more jeopardy.

He said:

"I think you have got to add a bit more jeopardy to it. Whether you do a reverse the top 10 or something, you've got to add enough points to it to make it worth the drivers to really go for it."

While Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff was against the idea and claimed that he was conservative about racing, adding:

"I'm conservative in racing. 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."

He added:

"Creating artificial gaming around the sprint race on a Saturday is not the way that I would favour personally. But that's my opinion. All teams, together with Stefano [Domenicali, F1 CEO], we just need to think about what is best."

It will be fascinating to see if F1 makes any changes to the Sprint format in the next season and implements some radical changes to create the necessary excitement during the weekend.