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F1 is becoming F-too-long as the 2016 season drags on forever

Felipe Massa is taking his final bow in F1. (AP Photo/Andy Brownbill)
Expert
27th October, 2016
10

Does anyone else feel as though the 2016 Formula One season is lasting a lifetime?

Maybe it’s the clearing championship picture, or perhaps it’s that the races in the Americas are held at unsociable hours for (Australian) viewers.

Either way this writer for one is feeling the effects of the F1’s record-breaking 21-race season.

The vibe inside the paddock is telling. The sheer length of the calendar is taking its toll on all permanent member of the travelling circus, and the final flyaway portion of the year, featuring seven long-haul races between South-East Asia, Japan, the Americas and the Middle East is gruelling.

It all takes place in the context of incoming F1 commercial rights holder Liberty Media confirming it’s looking at ways to increase the number of races to boost revenue. It may make financial sense, but it threatens to stretch the sport and all its comprising components to breaking point – and that’s before considering the more pertinent question regarding calendar expansion.

Does Formula One really need more races?

Since 2010 the sport has lost five grands prix – races in Turkey, Valencia, Nürburgring, South Korea, and India.

Others have signed contracts but failed to materialise, and a number of classic events are in a state of permanent danger.

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Indeed just this week the implications of a burgeoning calendar are threatening to derail another race, with Malaysian authorities reportedly seriously questioning the future of Formula One at the Sepang International Circuit.

With ink barely dry on the three-year contract signed last year, organisers are preparing to abandon F1 at the end of 2018, drawing to a close what will be a 20-year affiliation with the sport.

Malaysia’s Minister for Youth and Sports, Khairy Jamaluddin, said in a series of tweets that F1 no longer offers the advantages it boasted when the country began hosting its race in 1999, a year featuring a not-unusual 16 races.

“When we first hosted the F1 it was a big deal,” he tweeted. “First [race] in Asia outside Japan. Now so many venues. No first mover advantage. Not a novelty.

“F1 ticket sales declining, TV viewership down. Foreign visitors down [because they] can choose Singapore, China, Middle East. Returns are not as big.”

Hosting more races, at very least under the sport’s current uber-expensive business model and haphazard scheduling that has direct competitors Singapore and Malaysia hosting races within a fortnight of each other, is an obviously unsustainable game.

And the argument about calendar length has an interesting parallel, as raised by Jenson Button in the week before the United States Grand Prix.

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“People have a short attention span,” he said. “Short races, short sports, are on the up.”

The 2009 world champion believes a briefer sport would be better suited to the modern world and help to arrest F1’s sliding engagement.

“There will always be the diehard fans that have watched Formula One for 10, 20 years and will watch a whole grand prix, but that’s not who we’re after – it’s the younger fans we need to appeal to.

“It’s a tough one because Formula One is Formula One, and changing that is a shame because that’s the way it has always been, but we need to move with the times if we want the sport to be relevant.”

Running shorter races, perhaps in a weekend format featuring multiple sprints in the style of GP2, is a vexed and deeply polarising issue, but it is one under consideration for adoption.

But if the rationale behind such a change is to refresh Formula One, to keep it spritely and easy to engage with, can a similar argument not be made for shorter calendars?

In the same way elite tennis is defined by its four annual grand slams, in the same way the football World Cup or the Olympic Games are hosted once every four years, there is merit to the argument that having fewer races enriches the value of each of them and benefits the season, and therefore the sport, as a whole.

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For a sport that rewards competitors for efficiency – for extracting maximum performance from the minimum resource – it would not be out of place for Formula One to similarly consider how it could conclude upon a higher quality calendar comprising fewer events.

At least then everyone could get some sleep on the weekend.

Follow @MichaelLamonato on Twitter

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