Williams drivers ‘confused’ about F1’s plans for sprints

Williams’ Nicholas Latifi and Alex Albon have both admitted to being confused about Formula 1’s changes to sprint races for the 2022 season.

The sport’s organisers have gone back and forth on sprint races for the upcoming campaign with initial proposals seeing the Saturday event act as stand-alone races. This was eventually dropped in favour of the same format as last year whereby the sprint race sets the grid for Sunday’s grand prix.

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However, now – after it was questioned last season – the winner of Friday’s qualifying session will be regarded as the pole sitter and have that added to his personal statistics. Another change is the top eight drivers will score points rather than just the top three.

For the Williams drivers though, there remains confusion with Latifi mistakenly believing the sprint race will still be a stand-alone event.

“It’s great that F1 has showed that they were going to be flexible and reactive to if it seemed like it wasn’t working out,” he said as reported by RaceFans.

“Clearly there were some criticisms about the format, and there was a lot of suggestions of ways to improve it.

“I think what they have done is probably exactly what a lot of people wanted to see, that’s for a sprint race having no bearing on Sunday’s race, meaning Friday’s real qualifying sets