After a month without Formula 1 action, it’s finally race week. We will have the first Sprint weekend of the season in Baku this weekend. Teams up and down the paddock will be bringing upgrades and other changes to their cars that will hopefully produce an uptake in performance.
Join as we go through some of the expected tweaks and changes coming your way this weekend. Make sure to check LV BET Sports Blog for more information about Formula 1, and make sure to follow us on Twitter for more up-to-date news about your favourite sport.
Car Changes
The recent four-week break wan’t like the summer break, so teams were able to work on developing the without the jeopardy of losing parts. So this will hopefully make the pack more compact, especially Mercedes.
Mercedes – Wolf stated that the W14’ pace is “only the tip of the iceberg” as upgrades are imminent for the silver arrows. This hints that the team is confident that its approach hasn’t hit a ceiling, and it is examining viable ways to extract performance from what has been an underwhelming machine until now.
Apart from the changes implemented onto the car, Mercedes has changed personnel as James Allison moved back into the technical director role that he vacated 20 months ago, and Mike Elliott swapped places into the Chief Technical Officer role.
Ferrari – After a point-less Melbourne outing, Ferrari are drastically off the pace and has a huge mountain to climb if they want to be competitive at the top end of the charts. Fred Vasseur might have welcomed this break in order to get things stabilised, get people up and running, and they looked downbeat after a poor opening three races. They are hoping for a reset and to go again in Baku. We also remember that this race last year was a catastrophe for Ferrari, with both cars suffering reliability issues.
McLaren – Hinted at a big upgrade package, and this should go onto the car as Andre Stella was clear in his approach that the car needs a boost. The result in Australia was great for the team, but the Papaya team knew that the result could only be possible because of the crashes and chaos ahead of them. The team from Woking are working tirelessly to give Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri the best car and, with the car is correlating well with the development, so it should be a step in the right direction.
What’s new for this Sprint Weekend?
We first had our first F1 Sprint back in 2021, with the original format seeing qualifying moved to Friday and setting the grid for a new 100-km dash on Saturday, which determined the starting order for the main Grand Prix on Sunday. The tweaks and changes to the Sprint weekend effectively will make it a standalone feature of race weekend, without the impact of the finishing order of the Sprint determining the grid for Sunday.
Fridays will now include an FP1 session and standard qualifying session to set the grid for Sunday’s Grand Prix. Saturdays will be the day of the Sprint with an extra, preceding qualifying session coined the ‘Sprint Shootout’.
This Sprint Shootout will be different from the normal qualifying that we are so accustomed to, SQ1 will run for 12 minutes, SQ2 for 10 minutes, and SQ3 for eight minutes, and this session will replace the standard FP2 session. New tyres are mandatory for each phase, so we won’t be seeing scrub tyres on RedBull banking on their higher performance to get them through the session. Mediums will be used for SQ1 and SQ2, and softs for SQ3.
Any incidents or penalties accrued through the Sprint phase will not compromise the starting position for the Grand Prix, giving the drivers a bigger incentive to push across the 100km race. They should always try and avoid incidents especially since teams are operating under strict cost cap regulations.
The only aspect which will remain unchanged is the points system, eight points will be handed out to the winner, seven to the second-placed runner, and third gets six and so on, down until eighth place.
Race Winners
As one can see in the trend from the first couple of races, Red Bull is the best car around with the likes of Aston Martin, the most improved car, getting a podium in every race so far. Mercedes are rumoured to have made great improvements on their car but it’s a long way from competing for race wins just yet, with a hint of a resurgent Ferrari from the shadows that they casted upon themselves earlier this year. Championship leader Max Verstappen is priced at 1.35 to win the Grand Prix, whilst the nearest rival, his teammate Sergio Perez at 5.00 to take the chequered flag. As it so often does, proceedings in Baku are rarely smooth sailing, so we are pricing Fernando Alonso to get onto the top step of the podium at 11.00.
We will see how drivers get on when the format of the weekend is changed, and not many practice sessions are allowed to fine-tune their machines.
Podium Finishers
As we stated above, you can never discount Mercedes from a race, even if it’s at a time when they aren’t at their best. The race craft and the ability to be at the right place at the right time is key in Formula 1, especially in the first sector, where 20 cars are jousting for positions on a narrow street circuit. Lewis Hamilton is priced at 2.60 to finish on the podium, whilst Charles Leclerc is at 3.75 to bring home some valuable points for himself and the team. Lance Stroll showed some glimpses of his pace in Australia and Jeddah but is yet to produce the results and match his Spanish teammate, we are pricing the Canadian at 7.00 to get onto the podium.
Race Times
Practice 1 – Friday, 28th April 2023, 13:30 – 14:30
Qualifying – Friday, 28th April 2023, 17:00 – 18:00
Sprint Shootout – Saturday, 29th April 2023, 12:30 – 13:14
Sprint – Saturday, 30th April 2023, 17:30 – 18:00
Race – Sunday, 31st April 2023, 15:00
Times displayed are tracks times
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*Odds subject to change. Odds correct at time of publishing