Should F1 have taken 2020 as a break?

Every four or five years, depending on the whim of Michael Eavis, the Glastonbury festival has a fallow year - in which none of the usual mud-soaked festivities take place to allow the Worthy Farm grass to regrow.

Handily, a by-product of leaving the Pyramid stage trussing in its packaging for an extra year is that Glastonbury's organisers enjoy an extra year to secure the full line-up of artists, ranging from the headlining global superstars to the local bands playing their first festivals.

In those scenarios, there's a tangible benefit to enjoying a year off. While a company relying on everyday business would struggle to face a year out of the game to regroup and reassess, a one-off event - or series thereof - may have the grounds to do so, if its other ducks remain in line.

Remaining on that train of thought, here's a hypothetical for you: could Formula 1 theoretically have its own fallow year? Namely, could the world championship have decided not to bother with 2020, and instead wait for 2021 to begin?

Let's be honest, the focus of F1's fanbase at the moment is on 2021's technical overhaul and the much-anticipated improvement to the overall racing seen on-track. But as those changes are at least a year away, there's still one more season of the 'old' formula to plough through.

But a season of F1 is not something to trudge through; it should delight, captivate and enthral the spectators - who pay handsome sums of money for tickets, merchandise and subscriptions. As saturation point nears for many of those fans, no doubt accelerated by this year's mammoth 22-race calendar and a few seasons of occasionally brilliant but often turgid racing, some time away for everyone sounds temptingly liberating.

With 2020 as a free year, the work back at the teams' respective factories will be fully focused on getting the 2021 formula right. Engineers, rather than having to endure the pressure-cooker environment enclosed within each facility, have a more lenient timeframe to perfect designs - and that means there would be fewer long nights and early mornings as deadlines approach.

Given a human's penchant for procrastination, however, the old university maxim of 'due tomorrow, do tomorrow' will still sometimes prevail. But that's entirely down to the individual.

However, the idea does take a huge amount of pressure away from the engineers, mechanics and management. But with an entire year-plus-change of competition-free building, one imagines that some people may begin to kick their heels in anticipation of 2021.

Although motorsport does tend to overwork its employees, and the toll on the mental health of those involved has increased somewhat in recent years, taking away the competitive element - even if it is just for a year - flies in the face of why people become involved in motorsport to begin with.

When Fernando Alonso decided not to bother with Monaco ahead of his first attempt at the Indy 500, the media focus was colossal. In their droves, people tuned in to watch him

Everyone in F1 is a competitive soul, after all, and nullifying the point at which the cars race against each other would deprive them of that competitive element. And while the engineers might be perfectly sated by a lengthy development process for 2021, mechanics and technicians would have very little to keep them invested.

To side-step that, those employees could be loaned out to junior categories or other disciplines. But while 'spannering' for an F3 team might have its perks, tightening up the quarter-turns on a single-spec car probably doesn't create the same frisson of excitement as a successful quick-fix to an F1 car after a particularly hefty practice shunt. It'd create the itch that an F1-less world couldn't quite scratch.

Considering other employees who spend the race weekends on the frontlines - what about the drivers? Arguably, the 20 individuals in charge of driving the cars are the least affected - perhaps save for Nicholas Latifi, who'd be kept waiting an extra year before making his F1 debut. But there are so many disciplines that the current F1 drivers could experience outside of their usual homes, and could even perhaps lend some much-needed attention to them purely thanks to their participation.

A dalliance with endurance racing or rallying pose the most likely destinations to keep the competitive juices flowing. Valtteri Bottas now has a few rallies under his belt, while Kimi Raikkonen's F1 career break featured a foray into the world of pace-notes, mud and gravel. Carlos Sainz Jr would also have a tantalising opportunity to bring his storied name back to the arena in which his father won two world titles and a nation's adulation.

In the world of sportscars, a few more 'big names' participating in the 24 Hours of Le Mans would challenge Nico Hulkenberg's 2015 victory for column inches.

Without the inconvenient Monaco Grand Prix clash with the Indy 500, a flurry of F1 drivers signing up to do battle on the Brickyard would be another mouth-watering prospect. When Fernando Alonso, another Le Mans-winning F1 driver, decided not to bother with the streets of Monte Carlo ahead of his somewhat-successful first attempt at the 500 in 2017, the media focus was colossal. In their droves, people tuned in to watch him - even to watch his first tentative practice laps around the 2.5-mile superspeedway. Add more drivers into that mix, and that's a readymade media phenomenon.

Then, there's the routes less travelled. When Raikkonen turned his back on F1 for three years, he had a not-entirely successful stab at NASCAR - and there's certainly drivers who will be curious enough to try it. Haas, which already has its fingers in the NASCAR pie, would surely afford a couple of one-off drives to Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen if they wanted them.

There's also the world of motorbikes available, and one can only imagine the stir if Lewis Hamilton took his 2019 seat-swap with Valentino Rossi a step further.

For the drivers, then, there's plenty of opportunity. But the hypothetical scenario comes crashing down when contracts and logistics are thrown into the mix.

Again, there's always clever circumventions that might appeal to the sponsor - plus, in motorsport, sponsorship deals amount to more than just clamouring for exposure on the car. The preferred parlance in F1 today is "partnership", which is a more accurate reflection of the relationship between business and race team. Today, companies prefer to get involved in F1 not only to grasp attention, but also improve their internal processes or develop products with the expertise that only a top-level engineering firm can provide.

In that regard, having unfettered access to an F1 team's engineers to develop technical projects together is ultimately a good thing, but is it worth the millions of pounds that sponsors pump into teams?

Rather than actually posing the hypothetical scenario that we should bin F1 off for 2020, this is a suggestion to not take it for granted; there will come a day when it finally ends

When McLaren signed a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline back in 2012, it accepted money from the pharmaceutical giant not just for the space on the rear wing, but also for McLaren Applied Technologies to develop new ways of speeding up the manufacturing of - among other things - toothpaste.

And spare a thought for the carefully worded contracts and documents that would have to be rewritten. For all of their partnerships, sponsors still pay a certain sum of money to cover a prescribed level of cover on a car. Without an entire year of racing in the picture, that complicates the wording of those contracts. Although, from a marketing standpoint, companies can build their relationships with teams in a different manner, the very affluent pay a premium simply to be involved with F1; they pay for access.

With no racing, there's no access. For the commercially savvy operators in F1, there's no chance for deals to be struck through chance encounters or to network with the rich and famous in the hopes of further business. As much as we love to paint motorsport as, well, a sport, it's ultimately a technical and business exercise with a loosely sporting theme.

There's also the matter of contracts that promoters have with FOM to be on the F1 calendar. It costs an absolute fortune to get a race circuit on the bill, and the organiser of each of the 22 grands prix (well, except Monaco and its freebie status) would be most put out at having to put up the funds to secure a place - only to have to go through the rigamarole of recouping that cash. And that's further complicated when you consider finding a temporary home for the junior categories too.

And thus begins a financial cycle that consigns the idea of a year off to the dustbin. If promoters don't pay, FOM and the FIA don't have funds to pay the teams their Column 1 prize fee.

Without sponsors, which will surely be turned off by the idea of a race-less season, teams suddenly have a colossal shortfall in their budgets to make up. Assuming the cost of research and development remains the same, the financial hit of an empty calendar could bring at least half of the grid to its knees.

As much as some might feel that 2020 is a wasted season, and symbolises nothing more than purgatory between the current car formula and F1's brave new world, cancelling it is simply not an option - not that it was ever up for debate. While F1 often leaves the door open to be sporadically reviled by its own fanbase, especially when a race has an exceedingly low sense of variability, having a year away would undoubtedly cause irreparable damage.

While frequent Glastonbury-goers miss the festival during its fallow years, haunted by the idea of a welly-less weekend in late June, Formula 1's ardent supporters would miss the spectacle of the world's most advanced racing cars tearing around the world.

Rather than actually posing the hypothetical scenario that we should bin F1 off for 2020, this is a suggestion to not take F1 for granted; there will come a day, at an unknown point in the future, when Formula 1 finally comes to an end. Be it through some cultural shift, an unpredictable financial crash, or the heat death of the universe, it's not going to last forever. And, except in the latter case, we'd all dearly miss it.

Even the 3am free practice sessions.