Why shorter Formula 1 races would be a terrible idea

When asked at Austin what areas of Formula 1 he would change, Jenson Button said shorter races should be embraced to appeal to younger audiences.

"There will always be the diehard fans that have watched Formula 1 for 10, 20 years and will watch a whole grand prix, but that's not who we're after," he said.

"To try and attract them to something for an hour and a half is very difficult. People have a short attention span.

"We're like kids, we can't sit down and do one thing for so long - we have to move on and do something else."

He makes some valid points. F1 does need to appeal to younger audiences, and there is more competition for people's time.

But to say people have a short attention span is questionable. People are as intolerant of stuff that is boring as they have always been. It's also unfair to suggest diehard fans are not a target audience for grand prix racing.

F1 needs those loyal supporters, the ones who have stuck by it for years. They are the ones who attend races right now, who inspire their kids and bring them - the next generation - along.

F1 needs diehard fans and the younger generation. And shortening a grand prix is not the answer to attracting both of them.

Short-form versions of sports are entertaining. An evening watching cricketers smack the ball around in a Twenty20 match can be entertaining. There is drama with almost every ball - the opposite of Test cricket, where you can dip in and dip out and not miss much.

The Premier League of Darts has been a roaring success, attracting huge crowds with shorter matches, which have fewer sets. Snooker even introduced a shoot-out tournament where competitors play against the clock.

But cricket Test matches and the darts and snooker world championships remain the pinnacle of their respective sports. They have a bigger following and retain a loyal audience.

The shorter forms are events that someone might attend every so often, rather than watching every single one. Test cricket, like F1, is more of a commitment.

Watching someone smash a cricket ball around is all well and good as a standalone product, but it should not come at the cost of losing Test cricket - a discipline that requires a completely different set of skills - altogether.

The former requires the confidence to go for your shots and take risks in a short space of time. The latter focuses on impressive concentration, stamina and the understanding of the game over many hours, sometimes days.

Completing a grand prix in a good position is a real challenge. It's a craft. Maintaining concentration for two hours under the lights of Singapore is demanding. As is completing a race in the humidity of Malaysia, sometimes without the use of your drinks bottle.

It's why you often hear a driver who finished 14th is as happy as the guy who won the race, because they know they did everything they could to get the best out of it.

In a short, sharp sprint race, as we have in GP2, that craft is not the same. Drivers have to take more risks, and there are more mistakes. Yes, it's more entertaining, but it's not really a show of the very best.

There have been some cracking GP2 sprint races this year, but if that is what the mainstream F1 audience want, why aren't they all watching GP2?

In a world where there is now so much choice, something that requires around 90 minutes to two hours of your time faces a lot of competition for your attention.

That's quite a commitment, given people are increasingly getting their news by flicking through an app or website rather than watching a television bulletin or buying a newspaper. Videos that last a few minutes, rather than hours, get big hits. Social media has become a news source. In some cases, the only news source.

But that does not mean there is no room for it all. People still go to the cinema, play computer games for hours on end, sit down and have a meal with friends that lasts late into the evening.

The challenge is that the longer-form viewing experience needs to be gripping.

It doesn't mean there need to be overtakes on every lap, multiple pitstops and lots of spins and crashes. That would be too much. But it requires a handful of moments at every race where people go "Wow!"

That could be a brilliant pass, that took a few laps to build up to, a battle for the lead, or an intense strategy fight where two different versions play out over the course of the race.

The Italian Grand Prix was not very exciting this year, but there was a lot of chatter about what some called the overtake of the year by Daniel Ricciardo on Valtteri Bottas.

All F1 needs is a few of these talking points, these 'shareable' moments, at every race. Too often there is action at the start and then nothing happens.

People tune in for the start and then disappear for an hour before coming back for the final few laps to see who won. More often than not, they will not have missed much in-between.

And if people start to watch just the start and don't come back for the rest of the race, instead checking the result on their phone, then, eventually, they will not tune in at all.

So, it is not the length of the race that needs to change but the formula itself, so that the racing can be better.

If the racing is boring over the course of a two-hour race, if you change nothing other than the time limit, it's unlikely there will be any dramatic improvement to the show. Will people be any more inclined to give up 30 minutes of their time to watch something that is largely unexciting after the start? It is doubtful.

If the sweeping changes to the aerodynamic regulations next year do not work, F1 bosses must not be kneejerk in their reaction.

Ex-Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn was right when he said there has been too much focus on trying to find an instant solution to F1's problems, rather than working out a long-term plan.

"You want a short-term answer to something that doesn't have a short-term answer," he writes in his upcoming book Total competition: Lessons in strategy from Formula 1.

With new owners set to come into F1, and the bilateral contracts with each team expiring at the end of 2020, the sensible thing would be to plan changes for '21. A little over four years will disappear before we know it.

That will provide plenty of time to carefully consider how to improve the show, using insight from the people who know F1 and allowing for the testing and analysis of ideas.

Changes cannot be made at a whim, like the qualifying format tweak for this year that lasted just two races. More thought needs to go into rule changes to avoid scenarios like insufficient financial constraints for a new engine formula, which simply created different problems.

F1 will never compete with the intensity of the 100m final, that 10-second burst, but that is not what it is designed to be.

A grand prix is like a roast dinner. You don't have it every day and it takes a while to prepare. When the meat is beautifully tender, the roast potatoes are crispy and vegetables are done perfectly, it leaves you satisfied.

Sometimes you don't cook the meat or roast potatoes to perfection, but it doesn't put you off having another one the following week. F1 is like that - the message just needs to get out there.

Shorter races would be a good sugar hit, but only ever as a supplement to the main course.