Seven months after they last competed in earnest, the Formula One circus will push a post-lockdown reset button to open the 2020 season in Austria on Sunday.
The event at Spielberg will be held on its original calendar date, but is not the once-anticipated 11th round of the championship, but the first – a season opener delayed by the global coronavirus pandemic.
More than three months after the Australian Grand Prix was abandoned on the eve of opening practice in Melbourne, the race in the Stryian Alps will be run behind closed doors, without fans, sponsors’ agents and guests and only a handful of reporters restricted to the media centre.
The usual high-rise motor homes will be replaced by tents and awnings while the teams, cuts to 80 members and all in protective gear, will be operating in sanitised “bubbles within bubbles” in a paddock bereft of human contact and the usual swell of rumour and speculation.
