In the spotlight
Flavio Briatore has always been a central figure in the world of F1. He has won, revolutionized the sport, helped launch young talents who became champions, but he has also divided, scandalized, and was among the main protagonists of one of the biggest controversies in motorsport history. He is like that, take it or leave it, and the Alpine team decided to take him with them to have him manage the Enstone team again.
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But Briatore’s influence, given the magnitude and experience of the person in question, does not only concern his team: his opinion is very strong also regarding the sport as a whole and the direction to take for the near future. And from this point of view, his harmony with the current Liberty Media ownership and with Stefano Domenicali is total. In fact, the manager from Verzuolo has even more radical ideas, for example about Sprint races.
Even more show
In a long interview given to the site The Race, for the podcast The Race Business, Briatore confirmed a thought he had already hinted at months ago in an interview with Sky Sport F1: increase the Sprints from 6 to 10/12? Fine, but if it were up to him, every Grand Prix should host a double race. “If we continue like this, Formula 1 will continue to grow – Briatore assured – I don’t know how big this growth will be in the future, but it will continue. However, we also need to change the races a bit. I believe we need to do Sprint races. If it were up to me, I would do them every weekend because we need to give something more to the spectators. There are still weekends when we do nothing for the spectators because Friday morning is only dedicated to technical tests.
You go for a lap on the track, then you go back to the pits and that’s it; then on Saturday you have qualifying and in the end there’s the race, end. With the Sprint at least there are two races, two starts and the driver races for something, not just for the engineers“.
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“In my opinion, we need Sprint races. If it were up to me, having 24 GPs, I would do 24 Sprints – Briatore reiterated – This year when I arrived at Silverstone on Thursday, it looked like a Sunday seven years ago for how many people there were. You have never seen so many people on a Thursday. I remember that at Silverstone, ten years ago, there was no one on Thursday and there were few people on Friday. But on Saturday and Sunday [the stands] were full. Now there were already a lot of people on Thursday, 20,000 or 30,000 people“, he concluded.
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