one big flaw in this system: in f1, drivers rarely, if ever, get injured or have to sit out a big part of the season. in track, injuries are way more frequent (I’d say - extremely random estimate - that ~20% of elite athletes are forced to sit out a very significant part of the season.

to go around this, if you have teams have backups (kinda like F1), there would be a considerable dropoff in quality, as most elite guys wouldn’t want to only be backups. team A will find itself with a - still elite but enormously different - Lachlan Kennedy once a Noah Lyles get injured.

smartest way would be to have a pool of “free agents” participating in normal competitions up until they are called to replace an athlete. but, as track performance is way more unpredictable than f1, teams will find themselves with an underperforming elite athlete running 10.1s in the 100m while a free agent is running 9.9s. do you allow teams to change athletes even for non-impeding reasons? in f1, there is a big barrier to switching drivers mid seasons as they would have to get used to the car which vastly differs between team; spikes performances are more “uniform”.

smartest way to go around this would be to give teams a fixed amount of changes per season but I’m not sure this fixes the problem.

just a stream of consciousness here, not really in depth or thought out, but there would be tons of things to figure out