A short, flat-out race on Saturday with its own points and nothing to protect. Six of the twenty-three weekends in 2026 have one.
A Sprint is a Grand Prix with the strategy taken out. It runs to about 100 kilometres — roughly a third of a full race — and lasts around half an hour. Nobody has to stop for tyres, so nobody is saving anything for later.
That changes how drivers behave. In a normal Grand Prix a driver stuck behind a rival will often wait twenty laps for the pit stops to sort it out. In a Sprint there are no twenty laps to wait. If you want the position you have to take it, now, with the car you have, and that is exactly why the format exists.
A Sprint weekend squeezes two qualifying sessions and two races into three days, and it gives the teams only one hour of practice to get everything right.
The compressed timetable is the interesting bit. One hour of practice is not enough to understand a circuit properly, so teams turn up on Friday with a setup worked out on a simulator and have to be right first time. Get it wrong and you spend the whole weekend fixing a car you are barely allowed to touch.
The top eight in a Sprint score: 8 points for the winner, then 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 for eighth. Ninth and below get nothing. Those points go straight into the same championship totals as everything else — a Sprint point counts exactly as much in December as a Grand Prix point.
| Round | Grand Prix | Circuit | Weekend |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Chinese Grand Prix | Shanghai | 13–15 March |
| 4 | Miami Grand Prix | Miami, USA | 1–3 May |
| 5 | Canadian Grand Prix | Montréal | 22–24 May |
| 9 | British Grand Prix | Silverstone | 3–5 July |
| 12 | Dutch Grand Prix | Zandvoort | 21–23 August |
| 17 | Singapore Grand Prix | Marina Bay | 9–11 October |
Some older fans dislike Sprints. Their argument is that a Grand Prix should be the only race that matters, and that a Saturday race cheapens Sunday. It is a fair argument and I do not fully agree with it.
If you are new to F1, a Sprint is the easiest thing to watch. Half an hour, no pit stop maths, no tyre lecture, everybody attacking from the first corner. Start there, then watch a full Grand Prix the next day and you will see what the extra two hours are actually for.