Silverstone offered to host 12 races to help F1’s plight!
Silverstone says it offered to stage 12 Grands Prix over a multi-month period in order help Formula 1 realize its 2020 schedule.
The British track will host two successive F1 races, starting with next weekend’s British Grand Prix which will be followed a week later by the Emirates 70th Anniversary Grand Prix.
The schedule is part of F1’s compressed summer agenda that features nine events within an eleven-week period.
Liberty Media is slowly but surely dealing with the sport’s disrupted 2020 season, sparked by the COVID-19 crisis, adding earlier this week three more races on top of the ten rounds that were already confirmed.
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But before F1 was able to rebuild its calendar and comply with the world championship’s requirements of including a minimum of eight races, a limit that also protects the sport’s crucial Tv contracts, Silverstone had tabled a plan to domicile F1 exclusively at the Northamptonshire track for several months.
“We said, ‘we’ll support however we can’ – within the grounds of reasonableness,” Silverstone boss Stuart Pringle told Motorsport.com.
“But at one stage we offered to make the track available for a period of months.
“If they could get a championship away from one location – at one stage it looked like nothing could happen and the answer was ‘ship in the Italian teams and Swiss team, and the Pirelli guys, and park them at Silverstone for a couple of months and run 12 races around Silverstone and make television if that’s what you need?’.”
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The plan didn’t get many of votes however from The Formula One Group.
“The view was taken pretty quickly that that would be a bit dull, but they came back and said ‘actually, two would be quite helpful’,” added Pringle.
“And if you bag, within the first month, half the races you need for a world championship by going to two venues that you know you can control with a tight bubble, quarantine, whatever, then that’s a massive leg up on your journey towards securing eight races for a world championship.”
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