Zak Brown shares brilliant ideas to make F1 Sprint Races more exciting next year

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McLaren team principal Zak Brown has shared some of the changes he would like to make to Sprint Races in Formula 1.

Brown was speaking on the Track Limits Podcast and addressed a wide range of topics.

The Formula 1 calendar is becoming more and more congested with teams travelling to 22 different venues this year.

Some teams even travelled to another circuit, or at least got very close to the track, before the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix was cancelled due to flooding.

It’s been an exhausting campaign with a back-to-back finale in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi pushing drivers and team members to their limits.

On top of that, there were six Sprint Races to negotiate too, although Zak Brown and many others following the sport weren’t convinced they were as exciting as they could be.

Unsurprisingly, Max Verstappen still dominated these events, but McLaren benefitted too.

Oscar Piastri secured his first victory in Qatar and although it won’t be counted as an official Grand Prix win, it at least gives him some bragging rights over Lando Norris who is still searching for that first victory.

Brown shares his ideas for making Sprint Races more exciting

Asked what can be done about the shorter races going forward, Brown said: “I don’t think they take away from the glamour of a Grand Prix, but I do we need to which we are doing, look at the format.

“I think you would say on the whole they haven’t been quite as exciting as they can be.

“So whether that’s reverse grids, whether that’s mandatory pit stops, whether that’s a super, super soft tyre that goes off halfway through the race. I do think we need to do something to mix up the race.

“I think a mandatory pit stop would be good, I think if we had super soft tyres that deliberately went off halfway through and then you had to decide do we change, do we not change.

“I think that would be a kind of way to condense a mini Grand Prix because right now there’s no strategy in a Sprint Race, you just sprint. So, I think that would be interesting.”

Brown’s suggestion of enforcing a mandatory pit stop would see Sprint Races become more similar to Formula 2’s Feature Races.

It would be exciting but the most fascinating idea is an even softer compound of tyre that won’t last the full race.

The issue with this is it’s unlikely to fit in with Formula 1’s efforts to make the sport more sustainable.

There are likely to be changes to the format going into next year that may see the timings of the sessions change over the Grand Prix weekend.

But making the race itself more entertaining would encourage more fans to get behind the Sprint Race idea.