Teams actually spend many thousands of man-hours practicing their 'sport' - although these days it is mostly in the digital realm.
How do you think they come up with their car setups and strategies?

Sure but despite that, I can’t think of another sport where competitors spend less time practicing their sport than F1….

I don’t feel the T20 comparison stands up. A T20 is actually similar to a sprint race in that it is a shorter format. If, as a casual viewer, you were to watch only a few overs of either a T20 or a test there is no considerable difference between the two.

I am indifferent to sprint races. Occasionally the alternative tyre strategy can add something.

The sprint things are an abomination, through and through. The sad aspect is that people making so many $-millions can make such stupid decisions. F1 was not completely broken and it did not need 'fixing' in such a stupid manner.

If money didn't speak, you wouldn't have F1 at all.

that's gone*

It's fair to compare it to practice, because you still have the race even in sprint weekends, it's practice that it's gone, it makes sense to make that comparison to me.

Ahah, was thinking that with how many people don't like sprints and them being in the middle of night a lot of people wouldn't mind!

Morning timings are my favorite.

No other sport spends over half the time at an event just practising.

I can't think of many other sports where the playing conditions are different every time. Football fields are more or less all the same size, swimming pools are standard lengths, archery always uses the same size targets at the same distances, etc. If you consider tennis, weather conditions change, so a tennis player will spend several days in Australia before the event practising and getting used to the temperatures, but they don't need to learn the actual court so they all do it in private, at times to suit each competitor. Downhill skiing is more akin to F1 in that every course layout is different and in those sports the competitors do have practice sessions, just like F1.

I wouldn't call them abominations, but I don't like the mixed format. As it stands, the sprint race is just a truncated version of a GP, unlike other sports such as football where a normal match and five-a-side are completely different gaes, in cricket where a T20 and a test atch are vastly different. In F1, if you turned the TV on in the middle of a race, you'd have no idea if you were watching a sprint or a GP. If the sprint championship was for junior and reserve drivers only, I think a lot of people would get into it. When it is just a way of soaking up even more minutes on TV and a way of making some weekends worth more points than others, I think a lot of the longer-term race fans get a bit frustrated with it.

Indeed, that's one of the reasons they won't stop filling the weekends with numerous practise sessions.

It's perfectly accurate to call them abomination. That's what they are: disgrace that never should have come to existence. If money didn't speak, we didn't need to suffer from sprints today.

No other sport has a complete ban on practise between competitions either.

The Chinese Grand Prix will be the first sprint round. Its sprint race will start at 11am local time, which is 5am for most of Europe, 4am in the UK and 11pm on Friday night for viewers on the east coast of America.

Made early in China, why can't they have an afternoon race like everyone else (mostly)
The effect is to make it silly early in Europe and still rather late in the US.

It strikes me that it suits no-one at all.

Dude chill out, it’s just a short extra race.

It's a waste of an opportunity for a competitive showcase of the abilities of prospective young F1 drivers.

F1 has way too much practise. No other sport spends over half the time at an event just practising.

Unfortunately, sprint races just don't work. These are not sprint cars, nor do they have sprint tyres. So that's not a great solution, especially now that F1 has completely given up on the initial premise, which was to spice up the grid. This was obviously a bad idea, because the only thing that happens in a sprint is that the best teams can fix a bad qualifying result. It never works the other way around.

I understand why they don't do it, but they might as well skip Friday entirely, have practise and qualifying on Saturday and then, with no Parc ferme, warm-up and the race on Sunday. Giving teams a chance to tune their cars based on their grid position will do more to spice up the races than a sprint ever will.