It was billed as 'the death of racing' - instead it opened a bright new future

March 2020 seems as if it belongs to a collective dystopian nightmare, with its nightly appearances of prime ministers and presidents on TV screens around the world all making variations of the same pronouncement and the city streets an eerie, empty facsimile of their bustling former selves. Every Hollywood director's vision of disaster made real.

For racing around the globe, and especially in those countries where the sport lives under Damocles' sword, shutdowns with no end date, no time limit and no idea of how altered the world would emerge from the pandemic seemed to toll the death knell for the sport.

In Germany, where football is the national passion and racing is among the also-rans in the contest for people's hearts, instead of administering the last rites to the sport, those involved banded together to fight for its future.