This year’s officially licensed Formula One game is superb – but thanks to a certain pandemic, differs markedly from the real-life 2020 season. Developer Codemasters’ Franchise Game Director Lee Mather explains to Steve Boxer the tribulations of making F1 2020 in the time of Covid

Steve Boxer

ONE of the rare miracles of life during the Covid-19 pandemic has been the existence of a credible Formula One season. After the 2020 season seemingly had the rug pulled out from underneath it at the latest possible moment – with fans being turned away from the cancelled first race of the year at Melbourne – we thought for a while that the only way we would be able to get our Grand Prix fix would be via Codemasters’ F1 2020 videogame.

But F1’s new owners Liberty Media employed a concentrated dose of lateral thinking when the worst ravages of the pandemic began to ease, radically altering the calendar by, for example, holding two races on consecutive weekends at some venues, and introducing circuits that had either fallen off the F1 merry-go-round (Turkey, Imola, the Nurburgring) or were new to it (Portimao, the glorious Mugello).