Was a rerun of the Red Bull Ring the best solution to the latest headache on F1’s calendar? · Race fans

Has an opportunity been missed in F1’s announcement that it will race twice this year at the Red Bull Ring?

The teams are already facing the sport’s longest schedule with 23 races. Does it really have to be two races on the same track?

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic last year resulted in F1 breaking its longstanding convention of never holding multiple rounds in the same place in a calendar year. The disrupted schedule for 2020 opened four races months later than planned with a double headed ball at the Red Bull Ring and raced twice at Silverstone the following month.

Later that year, Bahrain held another double headed ball. Useful its track has more than one F1-capable layout. The second race took place on the outer circuit and gave the preliminary round a completely different character a week earlier.

However, F1 won’t have that option when they return to the Red Bull Ring this year. The Austrian track is already one of the shortest on the calendar and has no alternative layouts that meet the minimum length requirements for a Grand Prix.

Grosjeans only Mercedes run will take place behind closed doors. After the cancellation of the Turkish Grand Prix (only 16 days after the announcement, which must be a kind of record), a second race has been added in Austria. Istanbul Park was added to the 2021 F1 calendar instead of the Canadian Grand Prix when that race was canceled.

The new regime is unsatisfactory for more than one reason. The earlier date for the French Grand Prix means it will now coincide with the IndyCar race at Road America, which Romain Grosjean will be participating in. His planned demonstration run in a Mercedes F1 car in front of spectators at Paul Ricard will therefore not take place (his separate private test is still being carried out).

Approximately 5,000 ticket holders for the French race will experience disruption due to the date change and not all may be able to attend the event as it has been brought forward by a week. RaceFans know that the Grand Prix organizers are disappointed with the development, but the decision was not in their hands. F1 thanked them for their collaboration in a statement released today.

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Did the sport even have to replace its lost Turkish-Canadian lap with so many other races planned? Like last year, the world championship is official after eight rounds and should be ticked long before the summer break. Broadcasting treaties are believed to require at least 15 rounds, which F1 will achieve even if Covid claims seven more events.

Later rounds of the championship are in doubt. But as recent events have certainly shown, F1 cannot afford to leave anything to chance with Covid-19. The tide may be on the pandemic, but it certainly does not do so at the same pace in all places.

The infection and vaccination rates vary enormously around the world. The gradual return to normal in some countries is threatened by new variants of the virus. In light of this, F1 has apparently taken the view that “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush” and is carefully making sure that he locks as much of his championship off as possible while he can.

Still, was there a better option than having two races on the same track? Regardless of Austria’s round, in which the first F1 races after Covid were successfully held last year, France had obvious advantages. And not just to avoid inconvenience for the fans and to enable Grosjean’s demo run.

While the Red Bull Ring doesn’t offer any alternative layouts, Paul Ricard has a staggering number of variants – well over 100. While some of them wouldn’t be suitable for F1, there are a large number.

It would have been an ideal opportunity to answer the question F1 has grappled with since its return to the French circuit in 2018: would the race benefit from avoiding the Mistral chicane on its long straight? Various versions of several other turns are also available, including the Verrerie S curve at the start of the lap. Alternatively, the series could have reverted to the abbreviated configuration it had used in the late 1980s.

Paul Ricard has many different configurations. Paul Ricard could have held the F1 races on two almost completely different tracks in the same location. Instead, at the Red Bull Ring, it has no choice but to race the same track for two weeks in a row, and therefore risks putting on a familiar spectacle every time.

It could bring a different tire selection for each lap – Pirelli is considering its options after already nominating C2, C3 and C4 tires for the Austrian Grand Prix. But F1 experimented with this scheme last year at Silverstone and while the result was two different winners, it is questionable whether either race was a particularly memorable one.

During the unprecedented upheaval that Covid-19 caused in the world, Formula 1 did an excellent job keeping the show on the road. It ran around 95,000 Covid-19 tests on race weekends with a positive rate of 0.1%. It held 17 races last year and is determined to create 23 this year.

But for all the credit they deserve, and while the decision to continue postponing the last lost race is understandable, this seems like the second best solution.

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