Racing drivers are accustomed to speed. But as the pandemic peaked most of them discovered they were going nowhere fast. One day, we got a call saying that a driver needed to fly to Italy by midday the following day to take part in an all-important race — and that all the commercial routes were unavailable.
“So it’s the middle of a pandemic, and you’ve got a Brazilian national flying from Croatia to Italy, and the nearest aircraft is in Paris,” explains one of the team. “It looked like an impossible task. We had to ferry the aircraft from Paris to Croatia in order to pick the driver up. We had to get approval from both Croatia and Bologna airports to take off and land. And we had to do this in the middle of the night when everything was closed and everyone was asleep.”
“But I said: we’ll find a way. And we did,” our team member laughs. “I didn’t go to bed until I found out he had arrived safely the next morning, and he’d made it to the race on time.”
"So it all worked out. He was incredibly happy and rested. And I was a little tired…"
