F1 fans - and their social media posts - will help decide sprint qualifying future

“The sentiment was generally positive during the race and then it went quite negative at the end of the race, and the post-race comments were surprisingly negative.”

More detail on viewers’ response was provided by fans wired up to galvanic skin response sensors. These can detect emotional responses from tiny changes in skin conductivity caused by sweat glands.

“Doing the galvanic skin response biometrics is sometimes more interesting, because firstly, you can’t cheat it. But also we have a little bit more of a spread of different types of fans. Yes, they have to be engaged enough to volunteer to do it but aren’t necessarily diehard fans.”

Comments across the internet throughout the weekend ranged from brilliant to borefest but the race and the findings did provide F1 with plenty to think about moving forward.

Symonds says that he isn’t averse to changing the formula for future Sprints but says that further races are needed before F1 makes a decision.

Fan reactions are already being used in other areas. F1 has developed artificial intelligence that combines social media reactions with race and simulation data to come up with more exciting circuit designs.

The sprint qualifying verdict

Despite picking up on post-race disgruntlement, Symonds says that he sees the first race as a success.

We started the project, ranging from trying to provide more entertainment on each of the three days through to having a bit more jeopardy,” he said. “I think that essentially we achieved a lot of the real fundamentals.

“Overall we were pretty happy with it. I look at Lewis’s lap times in the sprint, I fuel correct them. Compared with the Grand Prix he was running about four-tenths quicker in the Sprint, so he was definitely pushing and there was no tyre conserving going on even though you know he wasn’t in a challenging position.

“I think Friday became the most interesting one we’ve had since we started qualifying that day, many years ago. We picked up Friday audience, TV, and social media numbers and Saturday the objective was to make sure we had cars going past spectators lots of times and get them out on the track. That that worked well.”

Changing the sprint qualifying format

Ross Brawn, F1’s managing director, has already said that tweaks to sprint qualifying are planned, with a job list of improvements that will be tested before being implemented.

But large-scale changes are unlikely for now. The Sprint set up a monumental fight between Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton on the opening lap and then largely settled down. The obvious answer might be to shorten the race and condense the action, but this could have the opposite effect rather than the all-out action fans might be hoping for.

“If the Sprint had been a lot shorter for example, would more cars are started on softs?” said Symonds. “The simulations probably showed it was safe to start on the medium so they did. It’s mostly trying to balance things like that.

“I know the teams would like a chance to do some limited changes on Saturday. I’d consider that because it’s almost transparent to what the fans see. That’s the sort of thing we might look at. I would rather we take three Sprint races on three different types of tracks analyse them, replay them on simulators, see what might have been done differently. What we’re really, really happy with is that for the first time in a long while Friday was something worth seeing.”

Sprint qualifying simulations

F1 is investing heavily in simulating changes before they are trialled in a race weekend, and had already run thousands of virtual sprints before Silverstone.

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff complained that the format brought “too much randomness” but impressively — or depressingly, depending on your view — Symonds said that the findings closely matched the outcome of the British Grand Prix Sprint.

Formula 1 is set to analyse and predict the future Sprint events scheduled for Monza and Interlagos, Covid permitting, and will be reliant on data received directly from its fans to determine the future of the sprint qualifying format.

Input from your sofa could help define what is changed and what remains from the Silverstone Sprint, but the experiment is set to stay for the time being while it provides fans a great spectacle.

“We’ll try and optimise it better,” said Symoinds. “That doesn’t mean there’s nothing we’re going to change for the next race. I’m an engineer, I don’t like to respond to one sample.

“The whole idea was to do three races this year and see what it takes. So I’d say we’re happy with it. I’m very pleased to say that pretty much everything happened the way we expected it to. We hope to see a little bit more action in the sprint but that will vary from circuit to circuit.

“We use a lot of simulation to try and figure these things out but we haven’t made any decisions yet. We said it’s an experiment, it remains an experiment.”