Two teams oppose F1's reverse grid plan
It is believed Racing Point has now joined the works Mercedes team in indicating it will vote against experimenting with short qualifying sprints and reverse grids once the 'ghost races' get up and running in July.
Before the corona crisis struck, Liberty Media had similarly tried to shake up the race weekend format, but F1 sporting boss Ross Brawn said "two teams put their hand up at the last meeting and said they wouldn't agree to it".
Red Bull boss Christian Horner, whose employer is promoting the first back-to-back 'ghost races' in Austria, has revealed that Mercedes is now blocking the new proposal.
"I think we've got a unique situation this year, and having two races at the same venue would seem the perfect time to try something different at that second event," he told Sky.
"Otherwise, with stable weather conditions, we're likely to have the same output in race two as we have in race one.
"The only person that wasn't particularly supportive of it was Toto (Wolff), because he thought it would interfere with Lewis (Hamilton's) seventh world championship campaign, and it would be too much of a variable."
Mercedes reportedly clarified that F1 doesn't need "gimmicks to make it attractive".
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Reverse grids suck. This is not F2. Stop your dumbass experiments and let's race.
Yes, leave reverse grid for the amateur kart tracks!
You want excitement? Declare a minimum lap time, so no coasting. Burn up 2 sets of tires and see how it works out driving balls to the wall! That would be fun for 1 of the 2 races.
This is another of the silly ideas Liberty seems to have about Formula One management.
Americans have never understood Formula One and it continues to show, after the absurdly strict technical rules that are on the way to transform Formula One into a one make championship.
During the last two or three years, cars have become so similar tat the only thing still lacking is to have them built at the same factory and leave to the teams the task of painting them in their colours and racing them every other weekend.
The real assence of Formula One has allways been the diversity of the teams an their technical approach to building a racing car, and when we lose that, there will be nothing left, except the stupid notion of spectacle that Liberty obviously seems to think about, above anything else.