The first Chinese Grand Prix in half a decade features more than your average quantity of unknowns.

It’s been so long since the sport raced here that the track will be treated as a new venue. The data gathered prior to the pandemic is largely worthless given how much the cars and tyres have changed and how much the track has evolved and transformed after fives years seeing very little action.

Then there’s the matter of this being a sprint weekend, forcing team and drivers to undertake their new-track acclimatisation in just one hour instead of three.

Every practice, qualifying session and race from the 2024 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Start Your Free Trial Today >

It will likely be the highest pressure single hour of practice for the entire season given the prevailing conditions.

Throw in the risk of rain — constantly changing but now forecast for Sunday — and anything could happen.

“A lot of unknowns from the track, not having raced here with this new generation of cars,” title leader Max Verstappen said.

“FP1 is going to be very important to get hopefully quickly in a good rhythm. Then we’ll just work from there, see what we get.”

This will also be the first weekend of the sport’s new sprint format, which has seen a rearranging of the weekend schedule.

Sprint qualifying is now on Friday evening, with the sprint race first things on Saturday. The weekend then continues as normal, with qualifying on Saturday afternoon.

Temas are also allowed to change set-ups after the sprint race, whereas last year set-up was fixed after first practice.

“I think the new sprint format is better,” Verstappen said. “It gives you more opportunity to still work on the car. It seems a bit more logical, I would say, and that’s what we’ve needed.”

Red Bull Racing might — whisper it — need that extra set-up time.

The Shanghai circuit is typically the kind of track that stresses the front axle more than the rear due to all its long corners. Thermal degradation — especially when it’s cool, as is forecast this weekend — isn’t a massive problem. Graining often is.

Those are the circumstances that brought Ferrari into contention in Australia, where Carlos Sainz won at a canter.

“On paper I think it’s a track where we could be a bit stronger compared to Suzuka,” Charles Leclerc said.

“We’ll just have to focus on ourselves.

“I think in the race we will be [closer], but let’s see. It’s been a very long time since we last drove here … but on paper I think we should be closer to them.”

It sets us up for one of the more potentially interesting weekends of the season.

PIT TALK PODCAST: Formula 1 returns to Shanghai for the first time in half a decade for a high-risk sprint race that will test the preparation of teams and drivers to their limits. And what does Fernando Alonso’s decision to stick with Aston Martin mean for the driver market?

WHAT EXACTLY IS GOING ON WITH THE CIRCUIT?

The team and drivers know what the Chinese Grand Prix circuit looks like on paper — long straights, lots of slow and medium corners, and mixed weather.

It’s everything they don’t know that concerns them.

FIA race director, Niels Wittich, issues a bulletin every round that outlines changes to the track for the attention of the teams and officials.

It outlines an extensive list of repairs to the circuit, including the removal of several bumps that have presumably been developed by the shifting marshland beneath the track foundations.

These bumps, if they appear on the racing line, can cause serious floor damage. Alternatively, teams might have to jack up their cars to unusual ride heights to avoid contact, costing performance.

It remains to be seen how effectively they’ve been ground away.

But something that hasn’t appeared on the notes are curious references by drivers to Chinese Grand Prix organisers ‘painting’ the track surface in some areas.

It was reportedly sprayed with liquid bitumen as an alternative to a proper resurfacing. But that liquid bitumen has eroded away with time, weather and the limited used the track has seen.

It’s an unusual treatment for an F1 circuit, and it was unclear to the drivers on Thursday what effect it would have once rubber hits the road.

“It depends a lot on the type of paint they used,” Charles Leclerc said. “That could cause different issues or have no issues at all. I hope it’s the latter that will be the case.

“For now, it’s very difficult to predict … I don’t think it’s the same everywhere, which might not be great.

“I think we just have to drive and see how it feels.”

Pirelli would normally report back these sorts of changes ahead of time but was unable to send its engineers to the track before the race weekend.

There are concerns that grip could vary wildly from metre to metre based on the level of bitumen still on the road, which would make set-up a nightmare.

But we’ll only know for certain once cars get on track on Friday.

WILL RICCIARDO’S CHASSIS SWAP MEAN ANYTHING?

Much has been made about Daniel Ricciardo new chassis this weekend, but the signs were clear in Japan that he may not need it.

RB was always planning to put a new chassis in rotation this weekend, and given Ricciardo’s struggles for qualifying speed, it made sense to give it to him to allow him to answer some lingering questions about his lack of speed.

But in Suzuka he qualified just 0.055 seconds slower than teammate Yuki Tsunoda. Given his race pace has always been strong relative to the sister car, the chassis question now feels like it could be a red herring.

Still, it never hurts to try, and Ricciardo is eager to put the question of possible tub abnormalities out of his mind.

But just being in Shanghai might be the bigger boost.

Ricciardo has always done well in China. He’s one of only three active winners, and only once — in his maiden full-time season — has he finished outside the points.

Many will recall his epic victory in 2018 and the gutsy pass on Valtteri Bottas for the lead.

Ricciardo thinks more of his understated but crucial seventh place in 2019, his first season after leaving Red Bull Racing.

“The race that kickstarted everything with my Renault campaign,” he described it as. “We struggled the first few races then came here and found something. That was really positive from that race onwards for us.

“I’d love to replicate that five years later.

“On paper we’re not in a good place, but we’re not far off. It’s not like we’re really struggling or missing something in particular.

“I know it’s a little bit here and there, but it definitely hasn’t taken any confidence away from me.

“I stand here very confident I can get the job done.”

It’s still early days for Ricciardo. He’s undoubtedly under pressure, but one or two good results would be enough to completely change the narrative.

This could be the weekend that process finally starts.

CAN WILLIAMS GET THROUGH THE WEEKEND UNSCATHED?

From new chassis to no chassis, Williams has arrived at round 5 of the season still with a depleted supply of any team’s most important part: the chassis.

Williams’s struggles for spares became evident in Australia, when Alex Albon wrote off his chassis in a big practice crash. The team made the painful decision to give Logan Sargeant’s car to Albon, figuring the more experienced Thai driver was a better chance of scoring points, though the race didn’t go his way.

In Japan Sargeant crashed during FP1. The damage was bad enough that he couldn’t take part in FP2, though the tub was thankfully spared.

But then Albon got himself tangled in a first-lap crash that did serious damage to his machine again, and Sargeant ran off into the stones late in the afternoon.

There would’ve been a lot of clenched jaws in the Williams garage and factory throughout the weekend.

The clenching will return again in China.

While this isn’t the riskiest circuit on the calendar, it is a brand-new track to Sargeant, and the simulator model he would have trained on would have been incomplete given the state of the surface.

Albon, meanwhile, has raced here only once in F1 — in 2019, when he started from pit lane after a monster FP3 crash took him out of qualifying contention. At least he put in an epic comeback to pinch a point.

But none of that sounds confidence inspiring.

The litany of smashes so far this season are self-perpetuating in that they’ve pushed back the date the spare chassis will arrive. The latest estimate is the next race in Miami.

Another crash, though, could push that back — and continue adding to the team’s fat-climbing damage bill in the cost-cap era.

CAN McLAREN CAPITALISE ON SPRINT WEEKEND TO MAKE UP FOR SHORTCOMINGS?

McLaren was one of the top sprint performers last season, finishing third in the sprint-only championship standings just seven points behind Ferrari.

Oscar Piastri was the only driver not in a Red Bull Racing car to win a sprint, standing on the top step of a podium for the first time in his F1 career in Qatar.

The team isn’t so optimistic for the first sprint of the year, however.

McLaren has made progress in 2024 but has retained some key weaknesses from previous years.

The MCL38 loves high-speed corners and short, sharp changes of direction.

What it hates is long corners, slow corners and long straights.

The Shanghai International Circuit comprises mostly long corners, slow corners and long straights.

“We’ve not been great in slow corners for a while, and there are a lot of slow corners here,” Piastri lamented. “There aren’t really any high-speed corners here — [turns] 7 and 8 and that’s about it.”

But it’s not total doom and gloom.

McLaren is fully ensconced among the top five teams. On a good weekend it’s a podium contender. On a bad weekend it wouldn’t fall out of the points.

While on paper this will be a bad weekend, the sprint format gives the team a chance to start on the front foot and ahead of some of its rivals.

With only one practice session on the schedule before sprint qualifying, execution could be more important than pure performance.

Mercedes is struggling to understand its car. Aston Martin brought upgrades to Suzuka that clearly didn’t work for Lance Stroll, even if Fernando Alonso got the most from them.

And that’s before considering the unusual track conditions.

The most valuable points are won on weekends teams expect to be their worst. This could be a crucial weekend for McLaren.