In 2018, I was working as Formula 2's press officer, working as tangentially to the F1 paddock as conceivably possible. Our occasional interloping among the F1 great and good usually went unnoticed, but we were still privy to the odd bit of goss about the driver market so long as it corresponded with our little world in the support paddock. Did you know that Lando Norris was being tapped up for a Toro Rosso switch mid-2018 in place of Brendon Hartley, or that Artem Markelov was apparently set for a 2019 Williams drive before his father was arrested? Funny little footnotes like that, which never quite happened.
F1's growing influence also started to permeate 'the other pitlane' on occasion. We knew way ahead of time that F2 was going to appear in the following year's F1 game, because we were in charge of carting the drivers off towards a non-descript room at the Hungaroring to have their faces scanned by the folks at Codemasters. And we knew that, in the big paddock, that a Netflix documentary was in the works and camera crews were following teams and drivers.
