Norris agreed with Hamilton, on the other hand, that Formula 1 must select the best venues for sprints. Some circuits provide more overtaking opportunities than others.
“At the correct tracks, I don’t mind it,” Norris said. “So when it was in Austria or Monza [Italy], tracks you can actually race on, fine, but Interlagos is not the easiest track for most people to race on.
“There are obvious tracks where you can have good fun. If you want to put on a better show, which is what the whole point of it is, I understand it.”
Esteban Ocon of Alpine said a sprint weekend was “very draining” because “all the sessions count.”
“When you do first practice, it’s the last time you can touch the setup of the car, so you need to be on it with every run, every lap,” he said. “You need to get as much understanding as you possibly can.
“You can’t really do a mistake that weekend because you are going to lose an important amount of points, so it’s quite tricky. It can be rewarding for a driver or a team, but to have that many sprints next season, I’m not sure.”
Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, said he could lose track of a weekend when a sprint and “more work” were involved.
“I’m totally split,” Wolff said. “Some are good, some are bad.
“I also wake up on Fridays, and I don’t know which session it is and when it is, so you can imagine for the mechanics and engineers, who know exactly when things happen, that suddenly things start on Friday, and we’ve really only one session to get to grips with the car,” he said, referring to Friday’s practice session.
For the purist, the sprint still has to win people over.
“I like Formula 1 how it is,” Norris said. “Just because I’ve grown up watching that, then being part of it. Sometimes I don’t like change.”