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I’m writing this script on 23rd March with an aim to producing it on the 24th and getting
it out on the 25th in an ever changing world, so a lot of this might well be out of date
by the time you see it. But, the principles we’re going to look at will apply no matter
what actually happens, and it’s full of speculation anyway. So… let’s have a look
at the 2020 Calendar then. We’re in a funny place right now where we
don’t actually know what the 2020 Formula 1 Calendar looks like, and we’re already
supposed to be well within it. We can lay out the year like this with each
slot representing one available week for a grand prix.
The 2020 Calendar was supposed to look like this, with all the races filling these weeks
as so. The COVID-19 coronavirus started spreading
in January causing China to be postponed and by the time we got to Australia it was already
too late to safely hold the race and the Australian Grand Prix was completely cancelled.
Since then, Bahrain, Vietnam, Netherlands, Spain and Azerbaijan have all had their races
postponed with Monaco being cancelled completely. So that’s two races down, six looking for
new homes inside the calendar. At the moment, based purely on announcements
so far the season will tentatively start in Canada, though with its current travel restrictions
and being… far away, it seems more likely we’ll start the season in France if things
are allowed to go ahead. Which, let’s be honest, is not yet guaranteed.
So right now we’ve got six races to slot in somewhere and 11 holes to fit them into.
If we include Canada for a second, we’re looking at a 20 race calendar over a 24, 25
week period which is… too intense. And actually untenable as we’ll see in a sec.
Chase Carey put out a press release on the 23rd saying F1 expects to run a 15 - 18 race
reduced calendar, which isn’t too bad, really. It’s on par with the length of seasons between
1998 and 2010 kind of time. Another option, not apparently being explored,
but definitely being discussed externally is creating a 2020-2021 super season like
WEC did across 2018-19. You could merge the two seasons, include some
repeated races, force teams to keep the same cars across the super seasons, utilise more
of the winter off season to throw in some of the homeless races and have a very long
season of about 30 races across 15 months. The exciting new 2021 rules aren’t coming
in until 2022 now anyway so if you force teams to work with the cars they have until then
that could save money and allow teams to focus on their 2022 cars.
And you could either add up all the points across the 30 odd races or do a “best 22”
like they used to in the old days, where your best 22 races count towards the championship
and you can discard your worst races. It’s a thought.
But, back in reality - if we stick to the plan - a reduced 2020 season where we continue
with what we’ve got - let’s see what we *might* be looking at.
And there’s more than a pinch of salt here. We’re doing a heckload of speculation.
First thing I’m going to do is assume Canada is cancelled. It doesn’t really change much
as we’re not going to be able to fit a race in here anyway, are we?
So we start the season on 28th June in France. Mmm, Paul Ricard. Exciting. Talk about isolation.
Six hanging races to slot in then. Now we don’t want to have 5 consecutive
races back to back - it’ll be the death of us all. So this week is out [13 Sep].
And really we want to avoid fours-in-a-row too as that’s also a bit too intense so
we can ignore these weeks, too as available slots.
So that leaves four available weeks to host grands prix. 20th July, 9th August, 23rd August
and 22nd November or 6th December. Of course we could move Abu Dhabi down to
the 13th December and free up 22nd November and 6th December. Let’s keep that in mind.
Let’s also make the assumption that Bahrain and Abu Dhabi will go back-to-back. That makes
logistical sense. When you’re putting an intense season together you don’t want too
many geographical headaches. I’m going to be brutal here and cut Vietnam
from the calendar. It’s one of the trickiest to move about, being a partial street circuit
and the race organiser hinted that they could have used an extra year to prepare anyway.
Street circuits will always be the least flexible to organise - something perhaps Liberty should
take note of as they continue to flirt with cities around the world.
That leaves five races. Let’s make the bold assumption that China
DOES get put back on the calendar somewhere. Lot of money in China, after all. Liberty
will want that race if they can get it. For logistical sense you’d want it near
Singapore or Japan but Singapore is run “as European” due to it running on European
time so let’s pair China with Japan. It can only go in these awful slots that would
cause a quadruple header so we’re going to have to ask USA and Mexico to budge up
into an Americas triple-header, which could be fun?
Now we’ve got Japan and China back to back in October, the American leg and then a finale
double-bill in the Middle East. So just Spain, the Netherland and Azerbaijan
left. There’s only really two slots left up here in the summer without causing nightmares
so we have to drop one of these events. Spain has the virus pretty bad and the race
organisers are having their own political infighting, but it is a permanent well-established
circuit; Azerbaijan is a street circuit so harder to move but it does bring in a lot
of money; the Netherlands is a permanent circuit but might also prefer that extra year of preparation.
For simplicity I’ll just assume the existing races carry on, but who knows honestly.
So Spain and Azerbaijan, with a little jiggle from Hungary can slot in nicely to finish
off a fairly basic calendar setup. No single weekends, seven double headers and one triple
headers. Seventeen races in 23 weeks. It’ll be tough
as hell but doable. Note also that in a reduced season, the value
of each race to the drivers and teams goes up in terms of how much each position contributes
to the overall championship. One race out of 22 is 4.5% of the whole season.
One race out of 17 is 5.8% of the whole season, so each race is 29% more valuable than it
would have been before, all things being equal. In a 22 race season you can have a bad race,
a retirement, a strategic blunder and make it up elsewhere.
In a two-race season, you really need to maximise each race. One bad race means half your season
was poor. So a reduced calendar ups the tension and
whoever comes out on top with certainly be a worthy world champion in this intense, shortened
season. So who’s it likely to be? Well obviously
I can’t say, especially given that preseason technical development has increased by 14
weeks, minimum. So we don’t even know what the pecking order is going to be, even after
winter testing. Teams will have gone back to their bases and worked to improve everything
and probably will turn up to whatever the first race is with full on b-spec cars.
But we can look at a few things, like which races are missing and see who would be favourites
for those races. Not having them on the calendar would be bad news if they were expecting good
points. So in my scenario these five races are missing.
Obviously we can’t know much about Netherlands or Vietnam so let’s ignore those.
Australia. Between 2016 and 2019 Mercedes scored 142 points, Ferrari 114 and Red Bull
57. So it being cancelled seems a really good
thing for Red Bull and a bad thing for Mercedes, all in all.
Monaco though, well: it’s been much more even across the three teams but Red Bull have
been particularly strong but for errors. The gap to Mercedes is much smaller here and Red
Bull will be rueing not being able to make up good points here.
Canada, is a similar story to Australia really in that Mercedes have tended to lead the way
and the German team would prefer not to lose this track while their bogey tracks like Mexico
and Brazil and Singapore and Austria remain. So overall, if the season (as expected) is
a fight between Mercedes and Red Bull, I’d say Red Bull would have good reason to be
buoyed by this change of Calendar. Removing a couple of solid Mercedes tracks,
getting their early season development well underway so they don’t lose bagfuls of points
in the early season like they usually do, keeping the momentum and pressure on the champion
team for a good twenty weeks? They could do it, you know. Lewis Hamilton’s title number
is not coming gift wrapped. Now, of course, we don’t know how this season
will look and this is a lot of speculation. But bear in mind - the shorter the season,
the more valuable the race. If a race is cancelled, check which teams look likely to benefit.
And send a lot of respect to the teams who’ll have to manage an incredibly tight season
with no real breaks. Phew. Until then, stay safe and stay indoors. The
virus is slow incubating so you can’t tell you’ve got it until you’ve spent the last
week passing it around. So don’t be that guy.