Ross Brawn: “Worth considering qualifying races in Formula 1”. Liberty Media outlined its vision for F1 from 2021 in a meeting with teams in Bahrain on Friday.

Formula One Managing Director of Motorsports and technical director Ross Brawn believes that Formula One should consider radical ideas like a Saturday qualifying race in its push to become more popular in the future.

Formula 1 boss is helping draw up a series of rule changes from 2021 in a bid to attract a bigger audience and one proposal suggested is for F1 to totally change the way the grids are decided – with a qualifying race rather than a timed session being used. Speaking in an interview with Sky’s Martin Brundle, Brawn suggested the concept of a qualifying race had merits – as it would be more exciting and would help shake things up on Sundays too.

“What we’ve done is invited lots of stakeholders to give us a view on the race weekend,” Brawn said when asked about the Saturday qualifying race idea. The objectives are: can we make financial improvements, help the teams in terms of their finances, can we help the promoters have a better show and can we get some diversity into the race without making it false? If we can get some diversity into the starting grid, which is genuine because it’s come from a race, maybe that’s worth considering. Having an extra race is an impact on the teams, but we need to look at the whole thing.” – he explained.

Liberty Media outlined its vision for F1 from 2021 in a meeting with teams in Bahrain on Friday, as it pushes for a more spectacular, cheaper and more competitive championship. Despite the fact that details still need to be sorted out with teams, Ross Brawn said the key thing for Liberty Media was delivering an F1 that was better for fans: “We have got to look more externally at what Formula 1 needs to be rather than internally. Move away from the personal objectives of each team and look at what Formula 1 should be. We’ve put our ideas to the teams and asked them to consider them carefully. I think it’s fair to say the revenue model was new, [and] our views on the cost cap were finally on the table.” – Formula One Managing Director of Motorsports and technical director Ross Brawn concluded.