Brawn on sprint race: 'I'd buy a ticket for that every day!'

Ross Brawn gave a personal thumbs up to F1's first Sprint Qualifying at Silverstone, highlighting the event's "sensational" opening lap and the positive early feedback from the fan community.

F1's managing director of motorsports carried the Sprint Qualifying concept to the table earlier this year along with F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali.

The FIA gave the green light to a three-race trial, and Saturday's historical first was a resounding success according to Brawn although he stressed that the sport's stakeholders would conduct a thorough review of the weekend's proceedings.

"I think one of the things we all saw today is a racing driver is a racing driver," Brawn said shortly after the 30-minute mad dash.

"And they're never gonna take it easy. So lots of actions through the field. I mean, that first lap or so was completely nail-biting, sensational. Then we had the little duels in the rest of the race.

"Fernando Alonso's performance today was another sensational part of the race. He got my vote for the highlight of the race. I'd buy a ticket for that every day.

"So I think we're very pleased. We'll let the dust settle on this weekend, and then spend some time with the FIA and the teams trying to understand if there's some evolutions we want.

"We won't be changing the fundamental format this year. And I think after the three races, we can sit down and decide where we go from here. But so far, very positive."

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Brawn made clear that F1's assessment would take into account the weekend as a whole and -equally importantly – the feedback from the fans.

"Now we're already getting massive feedback, positive feedback from our fans on social media, they love it," he said.

"But there will be fans who make some comments, and maybe there's bits they didn't understand, or they didn't appreciate. We'll take that into account as well.

"We need to view the weekend overall to see, because I don't see anything we've done which takes away from a normal weekend. I think it's all additive.

"But let's see the whole weekend. Let's see the race. And then at the end of it all, we can do an analysis as you say, talk to the fans, look at all the data and details, and see if there's some tuning we need to do.

"For me, there's some very appealing things this format, everyone runs the same tyre in qualifying. We still have the variety in the race, because fortunately we had two tyres that you could use.

"There's no handicap on people for the race in terms of what tyres they choose. So that's quite possibly something which you can take forward."

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