F1 has made a big mistake in starting the 2027 calendar with a sprint race

Each year from December to March, Formula 1 spends about four months selling anticipation ahead of its first race.

Car launches are spread out through January and February, testing offers a few days of guesswork about the competitive order and, by the time the lights go out for round one, everybody has spent weeks wondering who is actually fast and who isn’t.

For 2027, that question will be answered partially over 62 miles on a Saturday afternoon in Bahrain, because Formula 1 has decided to open its season with a sprint.

On the surface, it’s a small scheduling choice, but it comes with a real impact on how the season actually begins.

A season-opener is supposed to be a big reveal: everything the paddock has speculated about since the end of the previous season gets tested in real conditions, over a full grand prix distance, with nothing to hide behind.

A sprint weekend will remove that factor for many.

That slow build-up will also be compressed by Formula 1 staging its season launch as a single event in Milan on February 18, with all 11 teams unveiling their cars together in one night rather than spread across separate weeks.

Sprint races have proved, for the most part, to be low-stakes dress rehearsals, and only after that does the field get a second qualifying session to set the grid for Sunday’s actual race.

The genuine first data point of the season, then, will still only arrive at the fourth or fifth session of the weekend, but will be filtered through a Saturday sprint that has already told half the story, badly, as sprints usually do.

The decision is consistent with many others F1 has made over the past years as it attempts to attract a younger, more casual audience that is not so invested in the off-season as the average hardcore fan.

Bahrain’s slot as opener is really a statement of intent: even the one weekend where anticipation is at its highest and a clean answer matters most isn’t exempt from the F1’s unquenchable thirst for expansion.

And so, the sprint count rises from six races to 10 in 2027, meaning F1 will have a record 34 races next year.

F1 boss Stefano Domenicali has been open for months that this is a deliberate strategy, telling Sky F1 in July that “this is the way to go,” well before a single venue was confirmed.

That trajectory is a bigger story than any single date: F1 found out in 2021 — when sprints were introduced — that there was more potential to make money from six sprints (2023 and beyond) than from three (2021-2022), and so the logic suggests 10 will be better than six.

Max Verstappen, one of the main detractors of sprint races, said a grand prix weekend is supposed to build toward one crescendo on Sunday, not hand away the answer on Saturday, but that view has been outvoted by attendance figures and TV audience upticks that F1 is happy to quote to justify another expansion.

Once almost half the calendar runs on the sprint format, the distinction between “a normal weekend” and “a sprint weekend” starts to dissolve into: ‘this is now just how Formula 1 weekends work, with occasional exceptions’.

Nobody at Formula 1 will confirm a full season of sprints is eventually coming, but nobody really needs to. The trajectory is pretty clear for all to see, and the calendar will keep growing as long as it makes financial sense and teams and drivers can cope with it.

The case for sprints has never really been about better racing but about more competitive sessions to replace practice, full stop. And Formula 1 has been honest enough about that trade-off even when it doesn’t always frame it that way.

Like the six sprints that replaced the original three, the 10 that replace those six appear to be a marker on the way to a bigger number next.

Same region, same risk

Aside from the sprint weekend kick-off, there are more reasons to be wary of Bahrain opening the season with any fanfare.

The 2026 season itself never opened in the Middle East – it started in Australia – but Bahrain’s scheduled April date that year still didn’t survive: the race was relocated to Malaysia in October, and the following Saudi Arabian round was cancelled outright, both casualties of the Iran war.

At the time of writing, Qatar and Abu Dhabi’s status as the final races of the 2026 season is still not fully resolved, with Formula 1 keeping a European contingency on standby in case the closing rounds can’t go ahead as planned.

That hasn’t stopped Formula 1 from pencilling in Bahrain as the 2027 opener again, followed by Saudi Arabia, in the same window that proved untenable this year.

It’s a reasonable bet rather than a reckless one; venues get cancelled and rescheduled from time to time, and Formula 1 has said its normal plan is to return to the region as intended.

But it does mean the calendar is walking back into the exact uncertainty it is still spending 2026 trying to route around.

If that happens again, that will be another example of Formula 1 undermining its own start to the year.

A Monaco sprint

The sprint format will arrive in Monaco for the first time next year, and on the merits of what a sprint actually does – deliver an extra 45 minutes of green-flag racing – it’s hard to see how Monaco benefits from it.

A 62 mile sprint around the harbour where overtaking is impossible won’t produce real racing, but a shorter, lower-stakes version of the procession Monaco already tends to create on Sundays.