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Hello and a very warm welcome to the late breaking F1 podcast presented by me, Ben Hocking.

That's right, I have been left to my own devices.

I have no friends around me, with the exception of the sound board, as you can probably hear there. But there's still plenty to get into. With today's sprint qualifying session, I was trying to

write down some notes beforehand about what I wanted to talk about over the next 30 minutes or so,

looking for four or five bullet points,

I think I've ended up with about 12. It was quite a lot of drama packed into just one

qualifying session. Looking forward to doing this review solo, we get to play the game. How many

times will Ben's voice give up on him? I'm going with two. Let me know what you think.

Two seems fairly reasonable. But guess what? Talking nonstop for 30 minutes or so without

interruption isn't particularly easy, but I will give it my absolute best shot. I'm not actually

going to start with, surprisingly, the battle for poll out front. Of course, Oscar Piastri claiming poll position

for the sprint race tomorrow. I'll get there very shortly. I wanted to quickly talk about the

sprint qualifying format itself, because it's something that I've seen mentioned over the last

hour or so, of course, recording this pretty much directly after the session has taken

place. Some interesting comments. I think with the Belgian GP specifically, it wasn't a sprint race

last season. It was two years ago, so it's not the first time we've had a sprint here.

Because of the nature of the circuit, such a long circuit, it does mean we are a bit more suspect to

minutes on track without a lot of action. You know, the number of runs each team can get in

remains the same across the board. The fact that there are a longer circuit doesn't really impact

that. But it does mean that we do have these maybe longer gaps between flying laps,

...