Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsRegulations

Ecclestone suggests Saturday race for 2017

Bernie Ecclestone says a race on the Saturday of a grand prix weekend is one option on the table for 2017.

Following a letter from the teams demanding the return of the 2015 qualifying format in place of the elimination-style system used in the first two races, Ecclestone and the FIA conceded to the request with a change set to be implemented from the Chinese Grand Prix.

In a statement announcing the planned change, the FIA added: "Jean Todt and Bernie Ecclestone welcomed the idea put forward by the teams to have a global assessment of the format of the weekend for 2017."

Ecclestone has now told Sky F1 one of the options is to have a race on Saturday instead of a qualifying session.

"We’ve been looking," Ecclestone said. "Basically more the qualifying than anything.

"Maybe having a race on the Saturday which would count instead of qualifying, for example. We’re looking at all these things, which would be for next year obviously. We’ve made a big enough muck up to do that for this year so must not do that again."

Ecclestone has been campaigning for a change to the F1 race weekend format for some time, with the aim of providing better value for money for race promoters across the current three days of track action.

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.