The change that could fix Formula 1

Formula 1 isn't completely scared of change, just look at some of the rubbish rules and format tweaks that have been rolled out in recent years.

For example: try as we might, it's impossible to entirely forget that dreadful qualifying change introduced at the start of this season. Thank goodness it only lasted two races.

As that sorry episode showed, F1 is not afraid of altering something even if it doesn't need changing. Yet on other occasions things are deemed sacred, untouchable, and modern F1 is poorer for it.

They say you don't know if you like something until you try it, and while that's a dangerous mantra to throw around to force through change, if used sparingly it could yield results.

If you took someone to a grand prix weekend for the first time - perhaps someone who works for incoming new owner Liberty Media? - how would you go about explaining that four of the six and a half hours of cars running on track from Friday to Sunday are largely irrelevant?

By Saturday lunchtime we've had three hours on Friday and another hour the following morning, and still nothing of note to the outside world has happened. All we've had is teams perfecting set-ups, reducing the chance of variables to make the important parts of the race weekend more interesting.

Then, when you get to the showpiece part of Saturday, the main reason for people turning up to the circuit or switching on their TVs is little more than an individual time trial. Why is Saturday's 'main event' something that is guaranteed to generate significantly less interest than the reason most people love motorsport - the racing?

The answer in the F1 paddock tends to be little more than "that's how it's always been". But if you let tradition get in the way of progress, you're condemning yourself to a world that will forever hold itself back because it is too scared to evolve.

That is the position F1 has got itself into. There are lots of people who have been around for a long time, and it has been said in the entertainment industry that experience is the greatest deterrent to creativity, because you know all the reasons not to do something.

So instead of 'Here's why we don't do it like that', why not start asking 'Why shouldn't we do this?' at the start of the discussion.

With that in mind, let's look at how F1 could add a second race to a grand prix weekend. There are ways to do it that are far less disruptive than you may first expect.

Firstly, anyone who believes a race of roughly 200 miles on a Sunday afternoon must remain will be relieved to hear that it can be left alone. For now.

F1 has proven on several occasions that its Saturday format is not beyond (sometimes dreadful) change, so that's all we're going to play about with in the beginning. It's hard to see the genuine downsides to holding a race on a Saturday.

If traditionalists who consider Sunday's race untouchable don't like what comes before that in the weekend, they don't have to watch. But if you're an F1 fan, how can you turn down the chance to watch another race the day before a grand prix? Ratings peak at the start (and sometimes the finish) of races, so all this change does is double the moments people are most interested in.

Switching from one race to two over a weekend has already been proven to work in Germany, where the DTM added a Saturday race for the 2015 season. The aim was to increase TV ratings and track attendances on the first day, and the change was a success on both fronts.

However, one area where the DTM has perhaps got its balance wrong is that both races pay equal points. So although the Saturday race is slightly shorter and does not include a mandatory pitstop, it carries equal weight to the Sunday race. By Sunday evening, no matter how significant the events of the first race were, they feel less important, or at least slightly dated, which can make the narrative of the weekend harder to follow.

It's another tin-top series that has got it right here. The World Touring Car Championship mixed up its own format for this year, making its second race of the day the proper race, based on qualifying results, with the first race featuring a reversed grid. It means everything builds up to the final action of the weekend being the most significant, which in F1's case would preserve the integrity and importance of a Sunday grand prix.

That obviously means making the Saturday race shorter, but this has benefits too. Jenson Button was widely criticised for recently suggesting F1 should shorten the length of its races to appeal to a younger generation with shorter attention spans. There seemed to be little interest in actually engaging in Button's debate - once again a suggestion of change was brushed off with outcry that someone would dare take the blinkers off and try to look at F1 from outside the bubble of the paddock or the hardcore fanbase.

With a Saturday race, we would get to put that theory to the test. How about a race half the length, so it will take roughly the time of a MotoGP race, and from a 'show' perspective not much longer than the current qualifying hour once you include a podium presentation.

Shorter races are not necessarily a slam-dunk idea - think how dull the Mexican Grand Prix would have been without the final few laps of drama created by Sebastian Vettel and the Red Bull drivers. So there is a risk here.

But on the other side of that coin, a shorter race could cure some of the ills that often contribute to dull F1 races - notably the effect of carrying a full 100kg fuel load. The cars are clearly not very fun to drive when they are heavy, and fuel management is critical with such big tanks, so perhaps we would see more drivers pushing from the off if they get to start with a lighter car and therefore less of a laptime penalty.

Tyre management could be less critical in a shorter race, depending on the compounds available, although it is debatable if the excitement would benefit from no pitstops and everything being settled on track. Going back to the DTM as a case study, the variety added through pitstop strategy in its Sunday race means that is often the more entertaining affair of the weekend.

F1 drivers spend the majority of the season bemoaning having to manage their tyres through each stint of a grand prix, yet in Mexico those same drivers complained about how boring the race was with tyres that could do the distance and therefore didn't offer any strategic variety. Make up your minds, gentlemen.

Assuming we've convinced the powers-that-be to add a Saturday race, the way around it potentially being dull is to introduce an idea that really is sacrilege to many purists: mix the grid up. One of the counter arguments to Button's suggestion of shorter races was "don't make the races shorter, make them better". If it was that easy, surely F1 would have worked it out by now.

So if we are stuck with what we have, which in 2017 is almost certainly a rules package that will actually make the racing worse, then why not try something different for Saturday? Qualifying (perhaps as the highlight of a Friday?) will still take place to set the grid for Sunday - which as the main event of the weekend should pay more points, so it won't be in anyone's interests to sacrifice a result in the main race for some showboating on a Saturday.

And if you want to avoid any opportunity to tamper with grid positions for the shorter Saturday race, have it based - reversed or otherwise - on championship positions, with rookies at the back for round one.

Who knows, if any of these ideas prove to be a hit, they can be considered for the Sunday afternoon showpiece in the future. Imagine if we get to a situation where the radical changes introduced on a Saturday catch on and F1's popularity soars.

In that scenario a genuine case will have been made for changing the format of a grand prix on a Sunday, based on actual evidence rather than who can shout the loudest out of the people wanting change and those trying to protect the current format.

There is another reason to try such changes out, and it's one that is a dot on F1's horizon that is gradually getting bigger. The current format of big-money TV deals, something Bernie Ecclestone has been at the forefront of maximising from the 1980s to the present day, is a gravy train that can't be ridden forever.

New owner Liberty will undoubtedly have ideas in mind already for how it intends to frame the way F1 can be watched in the future. But if a closed off Netflix-style online subscription system is one of the ideas being considered, a Saturday race of lesser importance offers a great way to maintain a presence on conventional TV, ideally offering free-to-air channels a more affordable rights package to cough up for.

Non-subscribers are unlikely to be interested in watching a qualifying session for a race they cannot see the following day, but a standalone, shorter, hopefully action-packed race could be offered to TV companies for less money than is currently required, and it could act as the perfect appetiser to the main event. Like what you see? How about paying up for the big show on Sunday...

Assuming the Saturday race does pay some points, it carries the risk of something as significant as a championship being decided in the lesser race of the weekend. But with fewer points on offer the likelihood of that happening regularly is very low, and imagine the one-off spike in TV ratings on the rare occasion where the championship can be decided on free-to-air.

Think how many new fans you could get hooked, even more so if the title is there to be won on the Saturday but the driver in question doesn't manage it. Viewers have already invested in part of the story, and they could be that little bit more likely to take the plunge and pay to see the conclusion the following day.

No matter what you think of these suggestions, they are a million times better than the dreadful change to the Saturday format Formula 1 actually put through at the start of this year.

The suggestion in the headline of this piece should not be misconstrued as a claim that a Saturday race is the only thing missing to make F1 perfect. But it offers the opportunity to increase weekend TV ratings, add value to tickets sold by the circuits, a forward-thinking broadcast rights model, and a chance to get definitive answers on how different race formats would be received by the audience.

Don't fear change, embrace it.