The F1 paddock taking shape ahead of the Australian Grand Prix.\u00a0Getty<\/p>\n
Formula One has kept Sunday’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix alive by using charter planes to fly hundreds of affected members of the sport’s travelling circus to Melbourne.<\/p>\n
Following the travel chaos caused by airspace closure in the Middle East, the Press Association has been told that two chartered aircraft departed London on Monday night.<\/p>\n
A British Airways plane, which stopped at Singapore, and a business-class only Air X flight via Tanzania, carried staff from 10 of the grid’s 11 teams as well as F1 officials to Australia. The eleventh-hour flights were coordinated by sports travel agency, Travel Places.<\/p>\n
The affected personnel are due to land in Melbourne on Wednesday morning, 48 hours out from the opening practice session of the season at Albert Park.<\/p>\n
Roughly 2,000 people work at every F1 race, and it is thought at least a quarter had been due to travel to Australia via travel hubs such as Doha and Dubai.<\/p>\n
However, the conflict in the Middle East caused hundreds of staff to re-route or take chartered flights. One leading UK-based team told PA that more than 50 per cent of its travelling staff had been affected.<\/p>\n
China, Thailand, Korea, Japan, America, Singapore and Hong Kong have all been used as stopovers by those scrambling to make it to Australia.<\/p>\n
However, despite the disruption, F1 bosses are understood to be confident the race in Melbourne will go ahead as planned.<\/p>\n
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A paddock insider told PA: “It is a great testament to the sport how they are able to pull this off at such short notice, and to get us to the other end of the world.”<\/p>\n
Following this weekend’s race in Albert Park, the sport will immediately move on to Shanghai for the Chinese Grand Prix.<\/p>\n
A race in Japan follows on March 29 before two rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia on April 12 and April 19 respectively.<\/p>\n
The trouble in the Middle East places those races in significant doubt with F1 “closely monitoring” the situation.<\/p>\n
An F1 spokesperson said: “The safety and security of everyone in F1 will always be our priority.<\/p>\n
“The next three races are in Australia, China and Japan, not in the Middle East — those races are not for a number of weeks.<\/p>\n
“As always we closely monitor any situation like this and work closely with relevant authorities.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The F1 paddock taking shape ahead of the Australian Grand Prix.\u00a0Getty Formula One has kept Sunday’s season-opening Australian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-516429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}