F1 Just Scrapped Its Summer Break, Fundamentally Changing the Rest of the Season

Formula One’s mid-season break is typically a time for teams to regroup, reset, and escape from the insanity of the sport’s rigorous travel schedule. But it won’t be in 2020. Today, the break—which usually happens in the summer—was moved up to April. For the first time, F1 will have its “mid-season” break before the season begins.

That’s going to change the rest of the season. Ross Brawn, the sport’s managing director, already said that F1 was considering moving to condensed race weekends that would give teams less time for on-track work but more time for transportation. That, combined with more back-to-back races, could allow for some of the postponed races—like the Australian Grand Prix, Bahrain Grand Prix, Chinese Grand Prix, and Vietnam Grand Prix—to be rescheduled.

Add an eliminated summer break, though, and it looks like the the schedule is going to be extremely intense for the team members later this year. Not only has the break been moved up, it’s been lengthened. Instead of 14 days in July and August, teams will have to shut down for 21 days in March and April. Any work that teams were planning for the pre-season downtime will have to be paused for that.

That takes one week off of the team’s development calendar, while also forcing them to go harder for longer later in the season. All of this might make it difficult to push out mid-season upgrades, potentially changing the long term dynamic of the season.

Looking further, though, it may also have some ripple effects for following seasons. Ferrari has already made it clear that the team would consider refocusing on 2021 if they prove too far off the pace this year, but that may be difficult given the tightened timeline. Any team looking to get a head start on 2021—including by spending more than the impending cost cap this year—may find that hard to balance with an all-hands, full-speed season in the latter half of 2020.

But without this move, it’d be easy for teams to get around next year’s budget cap. Faced with more empty weeks on the calendar, Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, and other high-spenders may use their last uncapped year spending like hell to make sure they continue to dominate following the rules change. A three-week pause may prevent that for now, but this likely isn’t the last schedule change we’ll see for F1.

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