Christian Menath is working for Motorsport-Magazin since 2012, while his first race as a journalist was the Canadian Grand Prix in 2013. The journalists can get to the track in one of two ways – be chosen by the FIA or convince them to get a pass. Everyone is required to take three Covid-19 tests – one at home, the second on Wednesday before the event and the last one on Sunday, to be cleared for the next round.
“First of all I was really impressed by the work of the FIA. The 'return to motorsport guidelines' and the 'covid code of conduct' are two milestones that made it possible to race again. With these documents FIA dealt very well with a difficult situation. How good it worked was proofed by the positive test of Checo in Silverstone. Even though we had a positive result there were no major implications on the sport, not even on the team!”
Christian is one of the few that were able to be at the track: “This is just possible with a variety of measures – like the bubble. I was very fortunate to have been allowed to cover the first three events on site, but I didn't see a single driver for more than 2 seconds in persons because we were all in different bubbles. It was the same with team principles, engineers, PR people. I only saw them on the parking area or in the testing area. But I was not allowed to talk to them”.
Since the journalists are unable to get into the paddock or do impromptu talks with the protagonists face-to-face, many would ask why even go to the track, if you don’t get better access. As our interviewee says, it was a good choice, in order to see the new normal from the inside and be part of it.
“This is really annoying, but unfortunately it is necessary – and it was the right thing to do as the recent events showed. So you could ask yourself if it was a good decision to go to the circuit when you have no more access than the people back home. I think it was important to see how everything is organized, to have an impression of the whole situation”.
“On the other side FIA tried to give us a bit more, do some special press conferences or video calls with officials. This was very nice. But FIA had a very difficult job: First they had to choose the journalists. Of course you can only lose, because you will always make people unhappy. It's the same with giving the people on site a bit more: You want to give them something extra because they paid for their trip, but you don’t want to exclude people who were not allowed to come. It's difficult to make everyone happy, but FIA did a good job”.
Usually the media centre is a very loud and busy place. Right now it’s very different: “The media centre was a pretty strange place. In Austria there is place for 503 people working and we were 23 journalists and about 20 photographers. It was a lot more quiet than usually, but the mood was very good as you knew all the people pretty well”.
And how the cooperation between the teams and the media is working out? Some are doing better than others: “The teams handled the situation very different. Some teams had very professional media calls via video chats, others didn't do anything or did it very unprofessional. Usually during media session there's always a certain vibe between journalists and drivers, you talk a bit before and after the session off the record. But with the virtual conferences it's all very strict and also personally distanced. As there are 10 teams and sometimes 9 calls on one day it's also very difficult to manage everything correct. You don’t just walk out of one hospitality and walk into another, you have to look for the right platform, the right login details and so on”.
“Some older colleagues had difficulties with the technical stuff, but as the relation between us journalists is pretty good we tried to help each other the best possible way”.
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