MOTORSPORT: Red flags open door for e-sports

The Monaco Grand Prix has been cancelled. The 24 Hours of Le Mans has been postponed until September. A dark cloud hangs over the 'The Month of May' at Indianapolis.

Motorsport is grinding to a halt, but Supercars and the carsales TCR series are fighting back with plans for two e-sports series for their respective driver line-ups – plus a few ring-ins.

Supercars has already announced its e-sports plan and TCR will shortly announce details. In the case of the latter, it will also leverage the burgeoning iRacing platform and will feature a full grid of drivers and other names.

Top drivers from other categories also are lining up for simulator racing - Formula 1's Max Verstappen, IndyCar's Simon Pagenaud and Formula E's Antonio Felix da Costa among them.

F1 has postponed its 2021 regulations until 2022, meaning teams stricken by all that has come with the coronavirus pandemic will be able to run this year's cars (which won't race before at least the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in June) next year, when a spending cap will come into effect.

The first seven rounds of this year's F1 world championship are now off and 'crown jewel' Monaco, which was scheduled for May 24, won't be rescheduled. Indeed, Monaco’s Price Albert is one high-profile individual already diagnosed with COVID-19.

The mid-season break, when teams shut down completely, will now be taken through the first three weeks of April. Daniel Ricciardo's Renault team is even starting its closure this weekend.

An IndyCar test day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has been cancelled. It was to have been on May 10 -- the day after Supercar champion Scott McLaughlin's scheduled debut race in the North American open-wheeler series on the road course at the famed venue. Not only must that race be in doubt, but the Indianapolis 500 on May 24 too, now that Monaco is off.

The new hypercar regulations in sports car racing won't take effect now until the weekend of September 19-20, 2020 at the postponed 24 Hours of Le Mans in France.

That is forcing a reworking of the next World Endurance Championship calendar, which was due to begin in early September.

NASCAR has postponed seven rounds in the US until May 9 and may need to put off more.

The Supercar Championship won't start until at least June - perhaps at Winton in northern Victoria early that month or Townsville in late June.

Supercar chief executive Sean Seamer dismissed the idea of events without spectators.

The Supercar calendar has a lot of scope for delayed rounds to be run in the second half of the year.

The carsales TCR Australia Series has postponed its opening round that was to have been at Sydney Motorsport Park on the last weekend of this month and the cancellation of the Bathurst Six-Hour at Easter means the second TCR round will be rolled into the new Bathurst International in November.

Motorsport Australia - formerly CAMS - is reviewing the entire Shannons Nationals calendar and the the Australian Off-Road Championship that was to have started at St George in Queensland on the first weekend of April has been postponed.

Targa Tasmania, at the end of April-start of May, has also been cancelled, as has the Finke Desert Race in June.

America's Pikes Peak 'Race to the Clouds' hillclimb has been pushed from late June to the end of August, while Britain's big historic events -- the Goodwood Festival of Speed in mid-July and the Goodwood Revival in September -- are still on. At this stage.