An enthusiastic Ross Brawn claims he would have been happy to have bought a ticket for the sport's first ever Sprint event.

While the jury is still out, opinion clearly divided, F1 MD and technical boss, Ross Brawn is in no doubt, the Sprint is the best thing to happen to the sport for some time.

Ignoring the fact that the leading three will line up on today's grid in exactly the same order as they did in Bahrain and France - even Styria if you swap the Mercedes pair around - Brawn is convinced that the Sprint is the way forward for the sport.

"One of the things we all saw today is a racing driver is a racing driver," said Brawn in the moments after the event, which was effectively decided by the first corner.. "They're never going to take it easy.

"Lots of actions through the field," he continued. "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 today was another sensational part of the race," he added. "He got my vote for the highlight of the race... I'd buy a ticket for that every day.

"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," he insisted. "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.

"We need to view the weekend overall," he admitted, "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.

"For me, there's some very appealing things about this format, everyone runs the same tyre in qualifying. 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."

Check out our Sunday gallery from Silverstone, here.

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Defiant, 19/07/2021 3:52

"I hated it. No interest in it at all, year by year, ridiculous penalty by ridiculous penalty, stupid rule by stupid rule they are ruining F1.
I'd like to see it more like the older rules, where as long as a car fit into a certain size, they could do what they could be more inventive. I miss the days of V12, V10 and V8 all on the track together."

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2. Posted by a fan !?, 18/07/2021 20:38

"Pretty much agree with @alvarezh3.
This weekends Grand Prix has been converted to a 400km race simply divided into two 1/4 of race on Sat resuming on Sun with the final 3/4. Sat evening is effectively a 22hr red flag period.

Cannot see the point to be honest..."

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3. Posted by flyinglap, 18/07/2021 20:03

"Essentially, the positive point of this experiment was only the first few laps with all drivers pushing freely, after which more or less everybody held their positions to the finish line. The main negative point was that the driver starting from pole on Sunday was not the driver who had set the fastest time of qualifying, which is a perversion of the identity of the sport. Given that the objective is plainly to gain extra television time from Friday, my suggestion would be to let alone F1 exactly as it was, and to simply introduce a 10-lap race on Friday afternoon, after FP2, run with identical road cars (obviously with all the required safety gear), thus transforming an expenditure into an additional revenue stream, with the road cars plus sponsorship supplied by any interested manufacturers, even a different one for each race. This has been done in the past with huge success (BMW M1 ProCar and Mercedes 190 come to mind). The cars driven by the F1 drivers could then be auctioned for charity or put up in a lottery among the ticket holders at the track on Friday, etc."

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4. Posted by Wokingchap, 18/07/2021 13:38

"Personally not as enthusiastic as Ross, on the edge really but given time and getting used to it, it could turn out to be a nice addition to the weekend. Possibly early to make a rash assumption."

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5. Posted by alvarezh3, 18/07/2021 12:20

"Maybe a weekend with the following schedule would be more entertaining:

Friday:
FP1 and FP2 as usual.

Saturday:
Q1 morning and Race1 (1/3 of full race distance) afternoon.

Sunday:
Q2 morning and Race2 (2/3 of full race distance) afternoon.

FP2 on Saturday morning as it happened this weekend serves little (technical) purpose as stated by Verstappen. Maybe the intention was to have some F1 action and show the cars running around the track.

Race1 and Race2 should be totally independent of each other, penalties must be applied to the race where the infraction was committed.

Now we have two real and humanly uncontrolled, genuine and proper races. More entretaiment and value to the fan.

F1 can also stay as it has been, never heard or read anyone complaining."

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6. Posted by KKK, 18/07/2021 11:52

"Im glad Ross Brawn is sold on it, cos Im just not buying it. It was processional, boring and pointless. The only person(s) who benefitted were the TV advertisers. F1 is dying Ross, cure it dont ruin it"

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7. Posted by alvarezh3, 18/07/2021 11:34

"@Melemoi:

I am with you, that IS the REAL race, with a proper qualifying session preceding it."

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8. Posted by Malemoi, 18/07/2021 11:04

"I actually rated it. Best 17 laps I have seen in a while. Proper racing but point need to go to top 10. No racing from the pitwall - no nursing the cars. Good stuff"

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9. Posted by alvarezh3, 18/07/2021 10:35

"This is great, now the penalties incurred by faults on Saturday are applied on Sunday by moving the cars backwards on the grid!

Tell me this is not artificially manipulating the race to "spice up" the show.

Like politicians, they (FOM & FIA), are not interested in having living persons with any noticeable amount of gray matter following them. The less educated their followers are, the easier to manipulate, mislead and defraud.

I will refuse to watch the Sunday -choreographed- races, will not allow the FIA and FOM to insult me, PERIOD!

I'll read the Pitpass race report instead."

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10. Posted by nnails, 18/07/2021 9:11

"And the people who have not got sky TV will lose even more interest as 10mins high light program will be a joke"

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11. Posted by alvarezh3, 18/07/2021 9:07

"One additional note: Now most of the cars are aligned by race pace (except those that broke or had an accident and will be out if sequence). Being so, expect less passing as the faster "race pace" cars are already ahead of his preceding slower one.

I am betting on that you are going to need some luck Brawn, otherwise this will be boring, lets see!"

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12. Posted by alvarezh3, 18/07/2021 9:00

"This new weekend format seems like F1's take on a NASCAR race with a couple of twists.

NASCAR normally has 3 stages run one after the other on the same day, Formula 1 is done with 2, on two succeeding dates.

NASCAR allows for cars to pass each other on the pit stops between stages, in Formula 1 that is not possible for between stages there is what in reality is a "red flag".

Formula 1 is in essence one race with two stages. The second stage is nothing more than a continuation of the 1st stage do to the fact that the cars maintain the same starting order on stage two that they finished in stage one.

They call it a qualifying race and a main race, that's only a marketing gimmick to make it sound different than NASCAR. In the end is basically the same, even granting points on the stage preceding the last, longer and main one.

Fool no one.......Copycats! :-)"

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Brawn sold on Sprint

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