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2020 Formula One Fantasy League - Grand Prix of Eifel
Picks go here. Reminder, pick both one driver and one team for the race. You can only pick each driver four times and each team four times the whole season.
Picks close at Saturday, 9 am EST October 10th, or prior to the start of qualifying, whichever comes first.
My theory is that it's a combination of the modern F1 business model and COVID.
The San Marino GP was kind of an oddball, because the race was in Italy but was sanctioned by the San Marino national automobile association. That was done because the FIA has a rule where each country can only have one grand prix. So the Imola race used this loophole to get around that restriction.
I always thought that the real reason why Imola never returned to the calendar after 1994 was not because of the deaths to Senna and Ratzenberger, but because by then, the F1 business model of extracting huge fees from the race promoters couldn't work with Imola because there is no way the nation of San Marino can pay that money.
But with COVID, my other theory is that the desperation to create a race calendar allowed the FIA to maybe put aside the requirement that each grand prix must be sanctioned by a national automobile federation for 2020. That's why we got grands prix for Styria, Tuscany, Sakhir this year. Obviously, they could have named the Eifel GP and the Emilia Rogmana GP as the German GP and San Marino GP, but I think Liberty would have been weary of setting a precedence by given those national automobile federations a "free" grand prix because they didn't pay the rights fee to Liberty to get a proper race. Instead, we got weird grands prix named after regions this year.
If we got a race at Watkins Glen this year, they probably would have called it the Finger Lakes Grand Prix.
There was a wet and foggy start to the Eifel Grand Prix weekend, with the bad weather preventing any running in the first free practice session at the Nurburgring.
The FP1 session did technically begin as scheduled at 11am local time, but because of low lying fog around the circuit, the medical helicopter was unable to fly, meaning Race Control did not open the pit lane so the drivers were unable to get out on track.
Initially the pit lane was closed for the first 30 minutes of practice but as the fog had not cleared, it remained shut, and with an hour gone, Race Control advised that the pit exit would not open at all in FP1, effectively cancelling the session.
FP2 is currently still scheduled to go ahead at 3pm local time.
Race Director Michael Masi explained during the session that safety was the primary concern when it came to deciding on delays to live sessions.
Bottas does zero for me as a driver other than giving us a little taste of someone else at the top, however briefly that may be, like from qualifying until partially through the race for example . . .
09-30-2020, 01:15 PM
