Race will be absent from F1 calendar for the first time since 1960
Thursday 26 March 2015 06:33, UK
The FIA announced on Friday that there will be no German GP this year, reducing the season’s F1 calendar to 19 races.
Final confirmation that a deal could not be reached came after a meeting of the governing body’s World Motor Sport Council in Geneva. However, the writing had been on the wall for some time.
Although the Nurburgring had been scheduled to host this year’s race, which was scheduled for July 17-19, long-standing financial problems intervened.
Speaking in January, F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone declared that the track could not stage the race “because there's nobody there” and confirmed he was in talks with Hockenheim to become the sole host.
Hockenheim and the Nurburgring have alternated staging the race in recent years in order to ease the financial burden.
Yet ahead of the Australian GP, Ecclestone went a stage further. “The German Grand Prix is dead at the moment,” he told The Independent. “It won’t get replaced if it doesn’t happen. As with any race, if it is cancelled it is cancelled. There’s not much we can do.”
Any hopes of a late reprieve were dashed earlier this week when Hockenheim’s circuit boss said that it was now too late to step in.
The decision therefore means that there will be no German GP for the first time since 1960, with the race also absent from the calendar five years before that.
It comes even though Mercedes currently dominate the sport, while four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel has just joined Ferrari.
Even so, it could also be argued that interest has been on the wane ever since Michael Schumacher finally retired from the sport at the end of 2012, with large sections of the Hockenheim grandstands empty last year when Nico Rosberg won his home race.
The news also means that the calendar will be rather threadbare at the height of summer, with just one race - the British GP at Silverstone on July 5 - held between the Austrian GP (June 21) and Hungarian GP (July 26).
