Formula 1 teams have warned that shaking up the race and qualifying format next year could do little more than increase their costs.

The sport’s managing director of motorsport Ross Brawn has suggested trialling some changes to the race weekend format next year, which could include ‘qualifying races’. But teams are sceptical of the scope of improvement and wary of anything which would make the sport even more expensive.

“If we change the weekend format maybe there is some good points in there,” said Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost.

“But the most important thing is that the teams and the cars are on an equal level from the performance side. You can have whatever format, if there are some cars far ahead of the others, one second or even more, then it doesn’t change anything.

“What we have to provide the fans is a good show. For this the performance of the different [power units] and the cars have to be on a level within a few tenths of a second like it’s in the midfield. If you look currently there are three teams far ahead but the midfield is fighting very close to each other with a difference of a couple of hundredths of a second. There are good fights between the cars and this is what the fans want to see. I don’t think it is so much to do with the format.”

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Haas team principal Guenther Steiner said a mooted qualifying race would increase teams’ costs “because you need more spare parts because you have two races a weekend.”

“You need more MGU-Ks because they can break. We need to consider all this stuff.”

“We need to carefully think about it,” Steiner added. “There was a lot of things thrown around but we didn’t get down to discuss the detail about it so when we get in the detail that will be the difficult because if you change format and it costs a lot more there is a point where it is not sustainable.”

However Racing Point team principal Otmar Szafnauer said F1 should be open to experimenting with new formats.

“We did discuss some formats on Saturday to be able to mix up the grids for Sunday. We’ve got further discussions I think in Monza.

“I think if we are to improve the show there’s nothing wrong with trying and seeing how it goes, get some fan feedback, and if people like it and it improves the show I’m all for it.”

Any change to the race weekend format for the 2020 F1 season would mean altering F1’s sporting regulations for next year, which requires the unanimous agreement of all teams.

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2020 F1 season