MOSCOW, June 2. /TASS/. The International Automobile Federation (FIA) has approved a calendar of eight Grands Prix to start the 2020 Formula One World Championship, which was postponed earlier in the year due to the global spread of the novel coronavirus, the press service of F1 said in a statement on Tuesday.
"Formula 1 has today announced the opening eight races of the 2020 calendar following the postponement of the 2020 FIA Formula 1 World Championship due to the global COVID-19 pandemic," the statement reads. "The calendar has been approved by the FIA."
The list of eight approved Grands Prix include the racing weekends in Austria on July 3-5 and July 10-12; in Hungary on July 17-19; in the UK on July 31-August 2 and on August 7-9; in Spain on August 14-16; in Belgium on August 28-30 and in Italy on September 4-6. The announced Grands Prix are scheduled to be held without spectators at the racing circuits.
"Due to the ongoing fluidity of the COVID-19 situation internationally, we will be finalizing the details of the wider calendar and hope to publish that in the coming weeks with an expectation of having a total of 15-18 races before we complete our season in December," according to the statement.
The 2020 FIA F1 Russia Grand Prix, which has been hosted by the country’s resort city of Sochi since 2014, was initially slated for this year’s September 25-27 weekend.
Commenting on the renewed calendar for this season’s racing, Chairman and CEO of Formula One Chase Carey said: "In the past weeks we have been working tirelessly with all our partners, the FIA and the teams to create a revised opening 2020 calendar allowing us to restart racing in the safest possible way."
"We are pleased to be able to set out our opening eight race calendar today and look forward to publishing our full calendar in the coming weeks," Carey stated.
"While we currently expect the season to commence without fans at our races we hope that over the coming months the situation will allow us to welcome them back once it is safe to do, but we know the return of Formula 1 will be a welcome boost to sports fans around the world," he added.
This year’s FIA F1 World Championship was intended to be the first in the history of Formula One to run in 22 Grands Prix around the globe, opening with the race in Australia on March 15 and closing with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The championship was set to see a debut of the Grand Prix in Vietnam’s Hanoi and the return of the Dutch Grand Prix, which had been absent from the race calendar since 1985.
Organizers of the Dutch GP race announced their decision last week to cancel the race this year, opting to hold it in 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic forced earlier in the year to cancel the legendary Monaco GP, as well as the Grands Prix in Australia and France.
The previously scheduled races in Bahrain, Vietnam, China, Spain, Azerbaijan and Canada were postponed indefinitely. The following Grand Prix after the cancelled race in France was scheduled to be held in Austria on July 3-5.
COVID-19
In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus — named COVID-19 by the WHO — have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia.
On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 6,383,800 people have been infected worldwide and more than 377,700 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 2,920,880 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.
To date, a total of 423,741 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 186,985 patients having recovered from the disease. Russia’s latest data indicates 5,037 fatalities nationwide. Earlier, the Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.