One year on: the man who helped save F1 from Covid

“And you think there’s so much of what an international sport needs to do that is in conflict now with what the world’s trying to stop, international travel, social gatherings, all that stuff. And so you really think this is going to be like getting a square peg in a round hole.”

More and more races were cancelled in the first part of the season, and eventually teams shut up and shop and went into lockdown, awaiting further news. Around April/May, things looked very bleak.

“It was made clear very early that we were going to carry on in some way, shape or form, and so we should just start listing all the roadblocks, and try to find a way around them all. And that’s what we did. And on our side and the FIA side it started in earnest.

“And we just started thinking, how can we change this into what it needs to be now to survive in this environment? And how can we persuade governments that we are responsible, and able to pull this off sensibly, and not become some kind of international diseased colony that is leaving a trail of infections behind it?

“Because not only is the event you’re at important, but you don’t want to then trail it around to other events or leave a trail behind you. And that then began the conversation with the FIA.

“I’ve been a motor sport guy all my life, and I started reading stuff about the last pandemic, and how that moved around, trying to kind of learn. With Spanish flu, the world was very different than, there were no flights, and it never got to Australia, because the ships had gone, you’d either survived or died from it.

“You start reading about all that stuff, and the waves, how it dies down, it comes back. You read about these people that are sort of pseudo doctors, they pretend to be medically qualified. And they’re actually not at all. I felt a bit like one of those! You’re speaking to a much wider group internally and externally about disease, and how it spreads and all this stuff.

“So it was quite a voyage of discovery, reading about all that stuff. But gradually we were able to arrive at something. We understood that testing was necessary, we understood that isolating a secure area was important. And that we would need to produce a document, a very comprehensive document, for the country we’re going to visit, their health authority, their government, to say, ‘This is how we will do it.’”

“So it became our kind of blueprint. And we very much carried that on after that with the FIA protocols, and have developed it along the way.

“We all understood, FOM, FIA, the teams, that in order to keep this thing going, we had to have the cars on the track. Because without that, it all falls apart very quickly, not only for F1, but for F2, F3, a lot of other motorsports would stop. So it was really important to us to show that we can be responsible, and keep it going.”

For the remainder of the 2020 season races were confirmed in batches as venues became realistic options.

“We would speak regularly on the latest version of the calendar. Is this possible? Isn’t it possible? If it’s not possible, why isn’t it possible? All that stuff.

“I think the most extreme was going from Portugal to Imola last year, where it was 2500kms or something. ‘Is it possible? Let’s have a think about it. It’s only possible if it’s a two-day event to get everything there.’ I didn’t decide where we went, but I had some influence in the order in which we did it.

“We normally take a year to 18 months from agreeing a race to going. And that’s because sometimes you’ve got to build the track, and sometimes because it just takes a long time to put all the infrastructure in.

“And I think in Mugello we had six weeks from contract signed to race. And we’d never been there. I had actually tested there in the nineties, but it was completely different.

“So you just have to have a different mindset. Normally you would go and do a whole load of recces, and make decisions based on visiting the venue, but you just couldn’t do that. So we’d got to make all these assumptions. Because we were lucky enough to have a lot of experienced people, those assumptions were generally right, so we were able to put races on. And not only Mugello, there were others done in just a matter of a few weeks.

“And so it has had the benefit of changing where you think the horizons are. If somebody had said to me 18 months ago you’re organising a race in six weeks, I’d have said you’re out of your mind, it would just be a disaster, nothing would work.

“When you have to do it, it’s surprising what you can do”

“But actually, when you have to do it, it’s surprising what you can do. And I think COVID, while it is a terrible thing, it has made us all think in a slightly different way, and re-assess what is possible. I’ve definitely got a different idea of what’s possible than I had before.”

One year on and we’re back in Austria for another double header, with a full crowd now permitted for the upcoming British GP. However, later in the year things are still a little hazy, with races such as Japan, Australia and Brazil looking vulnerable. More changes to the schedule are likely, but in Europe at least, fans are back.

“It does look like there is some genuine light at the end of the tunnel,” says Nielsen. “Certainly in the UK, and Austria once again is in a good place. Not everywhere, this thing rises and falls, and in different parts of the world at different rates. And there are some more challenging races to come later in the year. But certainly the summer races in Europe look like they could be really quite different, with spectators.