The race is off. The Australian Grand Prix has been cancelled and with Bahrain and Vietnam coming up, but sure to be postponed as well, who knows when the F1 season will finally get going. It might be June's Azerbaijan Grand Prix at the earliest

before we see some racing. But even though we didn't see any on-track action here in Melbourne,

there was plenty going on off it with the saga over whether the race would go ahead or not.

I'm Ed Stroll, and joining me to untangle exactly what happened here, Scott Mitchell and Mark Hughes.

Well, Scott, coming to you first, you're looking enormously lively.

You didn't look like you were just using your microphone as a pillow and about to doze off, so you got away with that?

No, no, no, I'm fine. I was just recovering from a slight laughing fit before the...

Listeners might be surprised to know that we don't always record these in absolute

seamless one one swoop and on this occasion I think Mark and I were caught out with a

little bit of humour at your brilliant intro a play on the usual excellent way you open the

podcast very appropriate I think you and I had exactly the same idea didn didn't we, of how you should start this podcast. I jokingly said to you, you should start it with this. And you turned around and said, that's exactly how I'm going to do it. It's the obvious way because the race is off. And it works because normally I say the race is on. But this race, the race, hyphen, is on.

Yes. Don't forget the hyphen, the race.com. Never forget the hyphen. We've said it enough now. But don't forget the hyphen. We've got to remind people to head to our websites. That's always worth doing. Also joining me as Mark Hughes, who's had a little bit more sleep than Scott Mitchell. so we're counting on you to be a bit more coherent.

Are you feeling intelligible and insightful today?

Yeah, as long as you can understand my accent, we should be fine. I'm sorry, what? What? Damn. It was just noise. Alan Partridge. Exactly, yeah, exactly. There's always a bit of a partage reference. What's it all about, man?

That's even worse. Does that sound authentic, Mark?

No, it sounds like he's from Wales on the way, Swahili or something.

Anyway, we should get on with what we're actually here to talk about, which is the whole saga over the Australian Grand Prix.

We'll start with you, Scott, because we all came out to Australia.

We knew there were some question marks about whether it was all a good idea.

Everything seemed to kind of ramp up once we got into the paddock on Thursday.

Every single media session, every driver and team boss we spoke to, there was a barrage of questions about coronavirus and the situation there.

Is it a good idea?

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