This weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix will see a revised schedule following approval at this week’s F1 Commission meeting.

Saturday’s race will be completely separate from the rest of the weekend, with sprint qualifying in the morning followed by a sprint race in the afternoon.

The change means the teams will lose their normal Saturday morning free practice session, where they traditionally gather long-run data to help develop tire strategy for the race.

Mercedes director of track engineering Andrew Shovlin said the loss of an extra hour of practice would affect race preparations.

“When you only have FP1, it’s almost impossible to condense all the regular Friday and Saturday learning into one lesson,” he said.

“You lose the opportunity to focus on the long term and you have to think about what the real priorities are.”

According to Mercedes sporting director Ron Meadows, one of the consequences of the revamp is that the team will have to sacrifice a lot of what they usually do in practice.

“Finding the best fuel trim settings for qualifying and heavy races will be tricky for engineers and drivers,” he said.

“We’re going to need to maximize laps in FP1, so we probably won’t be planning a setup change that would reduce driver run times. It’s a new way of working that applies to all teams and offers quite a bit of out-of-the-box Chance.”

George Russell, Mercedes W13, Peter Gasly, AlphaTauri AT03

Photography: Steve Etherington/ motorsport pictures

Concentrated movements also increase the risk of accidents.

Meadows added: “The new format isn’t going to make a huge difference to how the garage crew operates at the weekend. However, when you add sections that require 100 per cent attack from the drivers and every lap is important to get to the next stage, you There is always a risk of a crash.”

Shovlin also believes that the way qualifying has accumulated without practice will make Saturday morning’s race very tricky.

While drivers are limited to one set of tires each Saturday in qualifying, Shovlin believes it’s unrealistic to expect the best performance in a single lap.

“It’s unusual that the drivers will go straight to qualifying on Saturday,” Shovlin said. “It’s a tall order to expect immediate one-lap performance from drivers, so I doubt everyone will do multiple laps.

“Medium tires can do multiple laps, but if you don’t have a few sets available, there’s a higher chance of bad luck, for example at a red flag. I think everyone will be on track and busy trying to do laps.”