Ross Brawn "proud" after F1 completes "impossible task" of racing in 2020

Formula 1

Brawn "proud" after F1 completes "impossible task" of racing in 2020

F1 raced 17 times in a condensed 23-week period

Sam Hall

Wednesday 16 December 2020 10:29

Formula 1 managing director motorsports Ross Brawn has declared his pride at the unity shown by the 'F1 family' to successfully complete an unlikely 17-race calendar.

When the Australian Grand Prix was called off in March, there followed a spate of cancellations that sparked the possibility of an entire year without racing.

Despite all the challenges, however, F1 defied the odds to put together a full season in the most testing of circumstances, leaving Brawn unable to disguise his pride at the communal efforts of all involved.

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“I think it’s a brilliant example of how Formula 1 in times of crisis pulls together as a complete family," said Brawn on the F1 Nation podcast.

"We spend most of our lives - at least I did when I was competing - trying to destroy each other and then we get faced with a situation like this and Formula 1 comes together and excels.

“I’m just really proud of what everyone was able to do this year because it seemed an almost impossible task when I look at how things were when we started this adventure. I’m really proud.”

Explaining it would have been "unrealistic" to have expected no cases to appear in the paddock, Brawn added: “I think the thing that none of us really understood was what will happen if we started to get an outbreak – how it would be managed, could we control it, could we limit it?

“None of us knew enough about the dynamics of this disease and how it spreads. The rudimentaries are known but the subtleties aren’t known.

"How long do you need to be in the company of an infected person and what do you need to do around them to become infected yourself? So all those things were uncertain. We simply didn’t know how it would develop.

"I think when we had our first positive cases, that was the anxious time to know whether they could just be limited, whether the systems and protocols we had put in place would be sufficient to contain the outbreaks which it did prove to be the case."

F1 put in place rigorous procedures, notably the 'bubbles' and 'sub-bubbles' as the teams were forced to operate in small clusters.

“I think everyone was pretty diligent in Formula 1," said Brawn. "I think we had to be on our guard as we progressed because it was easy to get complacent, easy to drop your guard.

"But I think the protocols we put in place, the facemasks, pretty rigorous wearing of facemasks, social distancing, bubbles, it did mean that when we had cases they didn’t escalate and become uncontrollable.

"For me, I think that was the key barrier for us to get through to know that we could manage it."