Ambiguity in sprint races must be avoided: Graphics play a big role

The British Grand Prix will be the first race in Formula 1 where the so called sprint race will be held. This is a new format where a short race is driven to determine the grid for Sunday's race.

To make sure the new format is understandable to fans, graphics will play a big role. Rob Smedley, technical consultant, says the following in an interview Motorsport.com "We discuss what we think are the likely outcomes and scenarios throughout the weekend. We try to be ahead of the game, of course. If you think about it, it's the first time we've been on equal footing with the teams because we're going to be learning at the same pace. That's pretty fun, but you've got to be able to communicate it as well."

F1 graphics of major importance

"Sprint qualifying and the set-up of the weekend can only be a success if we can keep the fans informed of what is happening. If it's all a bit fuzzy and you don't really know what's happening until the end, I think we're going to lose some of the benefit of sprint qualifying," continued Smedley. F1 has been working with Amazon Web Services, who design the graphics, for some time.

"Ross [Brawn] has been very clear to everyone how we should try and maximise this opportunity. So we're going to go through again with AWS what we can do and what we really need," Smedley said. "What are the important parts of sprint qualification itself? What are the important parts of the actual qualification? How does that all get woven into Sunday afternoon's race? Things like that. There are quite a few interesting aspects to that. We're going through those now and we'll make sure we're ready for Silverstone with both the stories and the graphics." As well as the GP of Britain, the Italian and Brazilian Grand Prix are also on the list for sprint qualifying.