Stefano Domenicali has given the clearest signal yet that Formula 1’s Sprint experiment isn’t just here to stay — it’s likely to expand again in 2027.
Speaking in the aftermath of a busy British Grand Prix weekend at Silverstone, the F1 CEO pointed to the one metric that tends to end any philosophical debate in this sport: bums on seats. Friday’s crowd figure was held up as the clincher, with Domenicali arguing that if you’re welcoming 150,000 people through the gates at the end of the working week, you can’t serve them a gentle warm-up and call it a day.
“If you remember in the beginning, people were always sceptical of what we’re doing,” he told Sky Sports. “And I think that we have the duty to be, in a way, brave and to think out of the box.
“I think you see the effect. With the people we had on Friday at Silverstone [150,000], if you don’t give something that has an action it would be wrong.”
Sprints have always been sold internally as a calendar-shaping tool as much as a sporting one: the guarantee of a competitive session on Friday, rather than a long, meandering set-up run with half the field in race simulation and the other half hiding their pace. The format’s current structure — one hour of practice followed by Sprint Qualifying on Friday, the 100km Sprint early Saturday, then Grand Prix qualifying later that day and the main race on Sunday — is built around that promise of daily consequence.
And, at least in Domenicali’s telling, it’s working well enough that F1 is now preparing to move beyond the current number of Sprint events. “Therefore, I think that this is the way to go,” he said. “And we are on the process of announcing the bigger number for the future and this will come when we announce the calendar very, very soon.
“Stay tuned.”
That “bigger number” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The backdrop is a format that began as a three-event trial, then jumped to six from 2023 as F1 refined the weekend flow and tried to sand down the rough edges. It’s also a format that remains divisive in the paddock — not so much on principle anymore, but on the practicalities: parc fermé constraints, the premium placed on clean Fridays, and the knock-on effect a single Sprint incident can have on the rest of a weekend.
But F1’s leadership has increasingly framed the conversation in terms of product delivery. The sport’s position is straightforward: if the calendar is going to keep leaning into blockbuster, festival-style events, then every day needs a reason to be there. From that perspective, the Sprint isn’t an add-on — it’s the mechanism.
Domenicali’s comments come with 2027 already expected to be another 24-round season. Reports have suggested the Sprint total could rise to nine or even 10 rounds, which would take the format from “feature” to something closer to a parallel championship rhythm running through the year.
There’s a subtle politics to this, too. A larger Sprint slate would effectively hardwire more high-stakes sessions into the calendar without adding races — an important distinction when the sport is balancing expansion pressure against concerns about workload and the weekly grind. If you can intensify the show without increasing the number of Sundays, it’s an easier sell.
What happens next is less about whether Sprints are popular in the abstract and more about where F1 chooses to deploy them. The format plays very differently depending on the circuit and the competitive picture. At some venues it can feel like a genuine extra chapter; at others it risks becoming a compressed rehearsal for Sunday. The calendar mix — and the willingness of teams to keep absorbing the operational cost — will decide whether the “bigger number” lands as progress or overreach.
For now, though, Domenicali is leaning into the same argument F1 has made since the beginning: the scepticism was predictable, the intent was to be bold, and the crowd response is the proof point. With the 2027 calendar announcement approaching, the sport looks ready to double down.
