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LUDILO OD 22 TRKE - OBJAVLJEN F1 KALENDAR ZA 2020.


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The Italian government will issue a decree shortly that will mean that people living in a string of provinces will be not allowed to leave their region until April 3 at the earliest. The move comes after the numbers of coronavirus cases jumped dramatically.  The restrictions cover the whole of Lombardy but also the provinces of Parma, Piacenza, Rimini, Reggio-Emilia, Modena, Pesaro, Urbino, Venice, Padua, Treviso, Alessandria and Asti.

 

The decree states that "in order to counter and contain the spread of the virus in the region, the following measures are adopted". People must "absolutely avoid any movement in entering and leaving the territories referred to, except for movements motivated by undeferrable work needs or emergency situations".

 

Ferrari is based at Maranello, which is in the Modena province. Whether F1 is considered to be an  "undeferrable work need" remains to be seen. Many of the team will already have departed for Australia and others may leave tonight - before the ban comes into effect, rather than trying to argue their way out. It does, however, mean that they will not be allowed to return home until April 3.

 

Skiing, public events, religious ceremonies and work meetings are also suspended, while schools, museums, swimming pools and theaters are to be closed closed. Bars and restaurants will have to make sure patrons keep at least a metre apart - or the establishments will be shut down.

 

 

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At least three Formula 1 team members are currently in self-isolation after being tested for coronavirus ahead of the Australian Grand Prix.

 

The members — two from Haas and one from McLaren — were tested at the Albert Park circuit and have gone into self-isolation at their respective hotels as a precaution while awaiting the results. The concerns were confirmed on Wednesday afternoon, with test results not expected until the following morning.

 

 

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Lewis Hamilton says it is shocking that Formula 1’s season is set to go ahead with the Australian Grand Prix in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

 

The opening race of the season is due to take place on Sunday, although the announcement by McLaren that it is withdrawing after a team member tested positive for coronavirus could force reconsideration of that. While Hamilton says he wasn’t concerned for his own well being in traveling to Melbourne, he says the way the rest of the world is reacting to the global situation is not being reflected within F1.

 

“I felt OK traveling out here,” Hamilton said. “Naturally being on a flight with a lot of people and stopping at an airport full of people, I didn’t really think too hard on it, I was just trying to make sure that I was taking all the precautions I could and not touching things and using hand sanitizer.

 

“I am really very, very surprised that we are here. I think in motorsport it’s great that we have racing, but I think it’s really shocking that we are all sitting in this room. There are so many fans here today and it seems like the rest of the world is reacting, probably a little bit late, but we have already seen this morning that (Donald) Trump has shut down the borders with Europe to the States and you are seeing the NBA being suspended, yet Formula 1 continues to go on.

 

“I saw Jackie Stewart this morning looking fit and healthy and well in the lift, and I saw some people as I walked into the paddock, some elderly individuals. It’s a concern I think for the people here — it’s quite a big circus that’s come here and it’s definitely concerning for me.”

 

Giving a strong opinion on the current situation, when asked why he believes the race is still going ahead, Hamilton replied: “Cash is king.

 

“I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know. I can’t add much more to it. I don’t feel like I should shy away from my opinion. The fact is we are here and I just really want to be as careful as we can be in touching doors and surfaces, and I hope everyone has hand sanitizer.

 

“For the fans, I really hope they are taking precautions. I was walking through and everything is going ahead as normal, like it is a normal day, but I don’t think it really is. I just hope all the fans stay safe and I hope we get through this weekend and we don’t have any fatalities or things in the future.”

 

 

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The Australian Grand Prix has been called off after Mercedes requested the event be cancelled.

 

A joint statement this morning from the FIA, Formula One and the Australian Grand Prix Corporation confirmed the rumours overnight that the race wil not go ahead after a member of the McLaren Racing Team tested positive for Covid-19 and the team’s then decision to withdraw from the Australian Grand Prix. The teams met on Thursday night and voted whether to race or not. Mercedes, Red Bull, AlphaTauri and Racing Point voted to go ahead, while Ferrari, Renault and Alfa Romeo voted not to. McLaren did not attend the meeting, while Williams and Haas abstained. However after the vote Mercedes changed its position after discussions with headquarters and thus the vote went from 4-3 to 3-4.

 

The statement said that there was “a majority view of the teams that the race should not go ahead”. The FIA and Formula 1, with the full support of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation (AGPC) therefore accepted the decision that all Formula 1 activity for the Australian Grand Prix be cancelled. The statement said that fans would be fully refunded.

 

Mercedes said that the team sent a letter to the FIA and Formula 1 requesting the cancellation.

“We share the disappointment of the sport's fans that this race cannot go ahead as planned. However, the physical and mental health and well-being of our team members and of the wider F1 community are our absolute priority,” the team said. “In light of the force majeure events we are experiencing with regards to the Coronavirus pandemic, we no longer feel the safety of our employees can be guaranteed if we continue to take part in the event. 

 

“We empathise strongly with the worsening situation in Europe, most especially in Italy, and furthermore we do not feel it would be right to participate in an event where fellow competitors such as McLaren are unable to do so through circumstances beyond their control. “

 

It remains to be seen if Bahrain can go ahead but the word is that Vietnam has already been cancelled.

 

 

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The home of the Spanish Grand Prix says it is “analysing options” with Formula 1 as the spread of the Coronavirus has caused many races to be cancelled or postponed.

 

A statement issued by F1 today indicated the championship may not begin until late in May. Spain’s round is scheduled for May 10th.

 

 

:classic_ohmy:

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With Haas and Williams making clear they were happy to go with the majority (so effectively abstaining), four teams were in favour of running (Mercedes, Red Bull, AlphaTauri and Racing Point), with four clear they would not: Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Renault and McLaren (who were taken as a no because they had already withdrawn).

 

With an effective tie, it was decided that Brawn would have the casting vote in deciding which way things would go – and he was in favour of going through Friday at least before assessing the situation further.

That motion was officially carried and teams left the meeting believing the event was going ahead.

But then Wolff received a phone call from his boss Kallenius, who wanted to discuss the impact of the coronavirus situation and what Mercedes should do with its F1 team.

It is understood that while Kallenius left the final decision on matters down to Wolff, so did not order him to decide one way or the other, he did voice concerns about the deteriorating situation in Europe.

Taking stock of the conversation, Wolff phoned Brawn and said that he was now voting against carrying on with the Melbourne weekend. That meant there were five teams ready to withdraw from the race – which meant only 10 cars would be available.

That was past the trigger point that the FIA needed, so was enough for F1 chiefs to inform the Australian Grand Prix Corporation on Friday morning that movement was underway to cancel the race.

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17 March 2020

Notebook from nowhere in particular

Joes-Green-Notebook.jpg
 

The Australian Grand Prix was, I think it is fair to say, the strangest race weekend that I have even taken part in. Firstly, there wasn’t a Grand Prix… and secondly, well, the world has turned upside-down and none of us can even begin to contemplate when things will get back to normal. All we have is speculation and numbers that we don’t really understand about the coronavirus Covid-19. As a result of all this, the green notebook doesn't have a lot in it. A few rumours of little import, a note saying that Ferrari and the FIA had been incredibly lucky that the crisis swept away the dubious-looking settlement over the 2019 engine. The other notes were about how the Grand Prix was called off.

 

I still believe, despite some of the more lurid reporting (a percentage of which has been done by people who were not there in Melbourne), that in the circumstances F1 shut the race down pretty quickly. And I don’t see that it was wrong to go when the decisions were made to go. Even now, five days after all of this happened, Australia’s coronavirus crisis is still not growing that quickly. Today, there are only 452 confirmed cases. However, most of the growth patterns in countries thus far have reached a point at which the numbers explode exponentially, as hidden cases come to light, and Australia will probably not be very different.

 

I have been watching the virus in my JSBM newsletter going back into January because I felt it would turn into something really bad. I think it absurd to try to put dates on anything. We won’t be going racing for a while, despite the fact that everyone hopes that it will all blow over quickly. Even when the infection rates plateau, you cannot just arrive and hold a motor race. Everything is seriously disrupted and in places it isn’t even messed up yet.

 

I think we will see, in the fullness of time, that the Chinese did a remarkable job to contain the initial outbreak. If you look at what is now happening in Europe – based on the figures we have – it is far worse. One can speculate that this is because the Chinese population is used to doing what they are told by their government, while in Europe people struggle to obey rules they don’t like.  Who knows where it will end? And if the experts in the health industries don’t know where it is going, what chance is there that any F1 reporters will have the answers? It’s daft to even consider it.

 

However, it is easy for people who don’t understand the complexities of the sport’s contracts to say things should have been different, but I still believe they did a pretty good job, given that the state of Victoria was pushing hard to keep the race going. In the end events forced the issue when the government’s Chief Medical Officer changed his opinion and the race was knocked on the head.

 

Could it have been done more quickly? Possibly, but no-one in F1 had disaster plans to cover this kind of thing. Why would they? The World Championship is 70 years old and we’ve never seen anything like this before. And the medical world is still trying to understand what is happening.

 

I think it is foolish to try to predict too much, except that things will happen more slowly than the optimists hope. I had a conversation with one of the team principals in Melbourne about where things were going and after a while they said: “Well, thanks for that. It’s really depressing”. I could only say that it was simply an opinion based on numbers I’d been following for seven weeks, and that it was not by any means a worst case scenario.

 

In fact, things have been much worse than I imagined.

 

I believe in being positive about things, but I also think one must be pragmatic and accept realities, even if they are unpalatable.

 

I have been reminded many times in recent days of Voltaire’s extraordinary picaresque novel Candide, written in the 18th Century, which is one of the greatest books of Western literature. It is as fresh and as sharp today as it was when it was written, a satire about religion, society, wealth, philosophy and hypocrisy, which highlights that we live in a world of chaos which we can never really control.

 

For those who don’t know it, it is the story of a character called Candide, who is naïvete personified, who goes through a series of what were real life events at the time, including earthquakes, religious purges, political executions and so much more, with different travelling companions, espousing different philosophies. The book exposed the hypocrisies of the time. Candide wants always to believe the best in people, but is constantly disappointed and begins to understand that humanity doesn’t change and all we can ever hope to do is to control our own lives and what we do as individuals. We cannot individually change the world, but we can avoid misery by not thinking too much about what life throws at us and by working to find joy and reward from creating our own worlds, in effect saying that happiness comes from within.

 

The book ends with the celebrated words: “Oui, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin”, which translates as “Yes, but we have to look after our own garden…”

With the coronavirus shutting down so much in our lives, including the sport we love, we may find ourselves spending a lot of time actually looking after our own gardens.

 

Hopefully, when the sport begins to revive, whenever that may be, we will be wiser for it, and will gain some perspective about what is really important.

It is certainly a good moment to reflect…

 

 

https://www.joeblogsf1.com/joesaward/id/00740

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19 March 2020

Thoughts on returning home...

 
 

It is only a week since the Australian Grand Prix was cancelled - and it feels like that was another age. So much has changed. I stayed in Australia and even lenghtened the visit because I did not want to return home and perhaps create problems for family members who were staying. Now they have gone home I can return home (hopefully), where I will go into lockdown at home - like everyone else in France.

 

These are extraordinary – and astonishing - times and Formula 1 is being impacted in many ways by the spread of the coronavirus Covid-19. The biggest headache for the sport – and its teams – is the financial implications of not running races. Without races, the sport is effectively without the majority of its revenues, and that is going to cause pain. At the moment there are still a lot of people who are not facing up to the possible implications of the virus. They are still talking about running their events. This is ridiculous. The sport has a responsibility NOT to spread the virus and thus it must shut down. And we must face up to the possibility that we will not get a World Championship at all this year. That is not an alarmist remark, it is simply looking ahead at a situation in which it is impossible to make predictions. We don’t know enough about the virus and have no means of stopping it, and if the medical people don’t know, how can any observer think that know the answers? So it is foolish to speculate too much in a positive way because it will simply lead to fans being disappointed. One can argue that the first race of the year would logically be in China, where the virus is now slowing down but it is going to be a long time before international travel is re-established and all restrictions are lifted. And one ought not to assume that countries that have cleared themselves of the virus will want visitors until it is clear that their countries are also clear. Right now, the problem is still developing and so we cannot even contemplate a list of dates. 

 

According to the FIA regulations, the series must have at least eight races to constitute a World Championship and these must take place on at least three continents. Nothing is impossible. We have now lost the Monaco Grand Prix and the Le Mans 24 Hours has been pushed back to a “maybe” date. The Indy 500 cannot go ahead, even  if the Americans have yet to understand what is required to stop the virus. It may already be too late for the country to avoid a similar situation to what we are now seeing in Italy, where a laissez-Fire attitude to containment has led to a much worse impact than in China. More people have now died in Italy than died in China and there is no sign of things getting better. The French have shut down the country to an impressive level but Britain and the US and many other countries have faffed about. Thus far we have seen F1 behaving sensibly (although some media have made a big fuss about Australia). The latest sensible decision is that push back the new rules.

 

The new 2020 cars that have yet to be raced and will be retained in 2021, rather than being set aside with expensive new cars being developed.

 

The teams are not the only people suffering. The Formula 1 group shares are down from $46 a month ago, to $24 today, although they have been as low as $20 in recent days.

 

Some of the race promoters are also staring disaster in the face. The Circuit of the Americas is loaded with debt and without races there is no means to meet the debt repayments.

 

For now, it is difficult to speculate about where this will all end. But that is not a priority in the world today.

 

Sport has effectively stopped.  It isn’t important any longer.

 

We should not be racing at all, unless it is safe to do so. We must not try to push for normality yet, because normality is going to cause the virus to spread still further.

 

But, while sport should not cause more problems, it still has an important role to play in the future.  When the world is in conflict, there are very few things that bring people together. Sport is one of them.

 

Sport reduces conflict and it can achieve amazing things. Back in the Cold War, after more than 20 years of conflict, China and the United States broke the ice with what was called “ping-pong” diplomacy when China invited US take tennis players to visit their country and play a series of exhibition matches. A year later President Nixon went to China and diplomatic ties began to be built.

 

Nelson Mandela got it. He understood that appearing in a Springbok jersey after the team won the 1995 Rugby World Cup would help unite his divided.

“Sport has the power to change the world,” Mandela said. “It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where there was only despair.”

 

Sport does many things: it keeps the young fit and healthy. It teaches them about leadership, teamwork and fair play. It makes them self-reliant and self-confident. It helps us all realise that we share more than we think. Sport has sometimes been described as being a substitute for war, with nations battling on sports grounds rather than on battlefields.

 

Johan Huizinga, a remarkable Dutch historian and philosopher, argued in his 1938 book Homo Ludens that the human capacity to play is a key element in building societies. In games we accept rules and it is this acceptance of rules that brings order to society and creates stability that would otherwise not be there.

 

So, it is important that sport helps to rebuild things after the virus passes. But that is going to take time. No-one in F1 had disaster plans to cover this kind of thing. Why would they? The World Championship is 70 years old and we’ve never seen anything like this before. And the medical world is still trying to understand what is happening.

 

We must face up to the possibility that there will not be a World Championship this year and that not all of the races and teams will survive the financial impact of the coronavirus.

 

But the spirit of the sport will not change. People will still want to race one another, and those who are not competing will still want to watch and cheer one our favourite teams. We will still want to see sport because it amuses and entertains us, and helps us to keep a stable world…

 

 

https://www.joeblogsf1.com/joesaward/id/00741

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