Three months after the Australian Grand Prix was canceled, Formula 1 is finally ready to start the 2020 season.
The coronavirus pandemic has completely changed the short and long term future of F1. A number of rule changes have been agreed in F1’s extended off-season, including the decision to postpone the major rule change until 2022.
Now we come to the actual business of the championship, which starts at the Austrian Grand Prix on July 5 and is followed by a race seven days later at the same location. The full schedule for 2020 remains to be confirmed.
Here you can see what the reworked schedule will do and why the incomplete calendar makes season prediction so difficult.
Over to you, Max
The most obvious insight from the revised calendar is that the season starts with a double header on a track that has become a kind of Bogey track for Mercedes in the last two seasons in terms of results, while Red Bull has excelled. Max Verstappen has won the last two races on the Red Bull circuit. Last year he took his first pole position in the third race of the new calendar, the Hungarian Grand Prix.
There must of course be a limitation here.
After the pre-season, there was general consensus that Mercedes remains the team to beat, and there’s no reason to reassess that opinion in the past four months. The failure to win the Austrian Grand Prix in 2018 and 2019 was due to separate issues, and the track still fits his 2020 car. But the fact that this recent story arrives there leaves the question of another difficult weekend open.
While we expected Mercedes to be dominant, it has also become a regular occurrence to complain about the timing of a form revival by Red Bull, which usually gives insight into the shape of the title win at certain events throughout the year. Typically, Red Bull had to wait a handful of races for its first real chance of a race win, and by then Mercedes and Ferrari were too far ahead in the championship to trigger a legitimate title challenge.
Since the introduction of the V6 turbos in 2014, Red Bull has only won the first four flyaway races once (Daniel Ricciardo’s 2018 Grand Prix victory in China). This year, the former world champions have a legitimate chance of winning a race at the first opportunity. Ferrari almost won in Austria last year. We must not forget that Verstappen raced past Charles Leclerc on the last lap. So it would be wrong to completely exclude the Italian team from this discussion.
From the championship perspective, a win without Mercedes would be enormous. We have never seen a fully charged Verstappen who believes that he is a real championship candidate. There are also clues from previous seasons that suggest that Mercedes is not always the best at dealing with high pressure situations. If you did not win one or both of the opening races, Mercedes would immediately step on the back.
Sebastian Vettel’s victories at the Australian Grand Prix in 2017 and 2018 caused excitement in the subsequent campaign. This would be the perfect way to mark the start of what is probably the strangest season of F1.
A missed opportunity to mess things up
The coronavirus pandemic gave the F1 an opportunity to experiment with its tired race weekend format, but chose to keep things the same, with three workouts before qualifying and the race on a schedule for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
From the race perspective, the biggest decision was to reverse in two of the European races. The idea was to revise the procedure for the “second” race in Austria and the UK, with the racing grid set in reverse order from the championship to spark interest in each event one week after a Grand Prix at the same location. Mercedes prevented that.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff argued that the F1 doesn’t need gimmicks to make things more exciting, but it was hard not to feel frustrated with the decision. It’s a short-sighted mindset, as returning sports have a much wider reach than before, with less overlapping global events to saturate the market.
Ultimately, it is the smaller teams that lose the most from deciding not to use reverse grids at some point.
Everyone knows this is an exceptional year and racing season – it’s hard to imagine when the F1 will have a better opportunity for this kind of experiment. These unprecedented second races had the chance to be something radically different, but the format will be exactly the same as seven days ago. This seems to be a missed opportunity, especially at the second race at Silverstone, which was named in honor of the 70th anniversary of the F1.
A lot of encouraging and necessary changes have been made behind the scenes in the past three months, but blocking back gates was a reminder that F1 is still sometimes too much attached to the traditions of those 70 years to do the right thing for the product.
A big missing ingredient
The absence of a live audience for the foreseeable future will take some getting used to, even if the fans in the stands are less important for the broadcast of an F1 race than events in stadiums that are surrounded by fans on all sides.
It will look strange if you don’t see the huge swathes of orange in Austria, the Lewis Hamilton fans in Silverstone or the Tifosi in Monza, and it remains to be seen whether the F1 will do anything to distract from empty stands at these events. At the moment there is no guarantee that fans will return to F1 races as usual.
But the lack of viewers has at least helped the calendar to come together in its current form. The Hungarian Grand Prix has always preferred to be at least one month away from the Austrian Grand Prix so that the event does not affect ticket sales.
According to Hungarian GP race organizer Ariane Frank Meulenbelt, the lack of fans has freed Hungary wherever the F1 needs it on the calendar.
“When we knew that we would not have a large number of fans at our event, planning next to the Austrian Grand Prix will be less problematic,” Meulenbelt told ESPN.
“We usually try to avoid standing next to each other to give fans the opportunity to get to both, and we try to keep them separated by a date. This will no longer be a problem if no fans come. It has proven itself. ” From a logistical point of view, we were more flexible and it quickly became clear that it made a lot of sense for Formula 1 to follow the Austrian GP. “
This logic could explain the reports that Canada, Mexico and the United States form a triple header later in the year. Canada has traditionally been in the middle of the European season, at the other end of the schedule for the races between Mexico and the United States.
To be confirmed …
The F1 is hoping for at least 15 to 18 races this year, but the second half of the schedule has yet to be formalized on paper.
It is likely that we will have double heads in Abu Dhabi, China and Bahrain, the latter examining whether there can be a second race on an alternative layout of the Sakhir Circuit. The F1 is also testing unique options such as Mugello from Italy – the Italian race track received the seal of approval from Sebastian Vettel after Ferrari’s most recent test – and Portimaio from Portugal.
Both a race for a new layout and first-time events on race tracks give the already difficult to predict season more levels. And it is likely that we will still guess what the business end of the championship will look like.
It is clear that the F1 hopes to officially have more races on the agenda before the Austrian Grand Prix, but it is unlikely that we will have the final calendar for 2020 through Sunday. F1 responds to a constantly changing global picture and the only thing that was certain during the pandemic is how impossible it was to predict short or long term events clearly.
Uncertainty as to how the coronavirus pandemic could develop in the second half of the year will continue to cause concern as the season progresses. The situation in North America is particularly worrying – Canada is hoping for a race on October 11th, although there is a question mark next to that race and the other two contests on the continent, the US Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, and the Mexican Grand Prix in Mexico City.
The order of the last races could of course influence how a championship fight develops, while fewer events than originally planned mean a higher price for mistakes during the year.
In the official F1 podcast, McLaren CEO Zak Brown said there are still doubts about how many races the championship will actually be this year.
“I think the caution is that we are racing, but I don’t think there is a guarantee that we will do as many races as we hope,” he said. “I think we’ll do it, but I don’t think life is back to normal just because we’re going to race. I think we have to be very careful, very hard working, following the rules, being very conservative.
“Of course we’re all looking forward to racing again. I think sport is a great healer around the world, and TV ratings and the following will be very strong – you can only see so many reps of sport!”
“I think we need to keep our heads down and make sure we get through this year. We will all have survived if we have done a great job in the past three or four months, but we still have a way to go.”
This uncertainty means that the teams are unlikely to know exactly how the championship will end. While this is hardly ideal for those in charge of logistics and putting together the final calendar, it creates a fascinating and unprecedented situation regarding a championship, as we may never really know how long the championship will last.
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