Following Imola on April 18, and Portimo on May 2, Formula 1’s 2021 calendar confirmed that two other tracks for events that were canceled or postponed were scenes of a good race last year. Can also enter. : Another event in Turkey GP and Bahrain, which could have been held on the alternate track of Sakhir GP.
It is quite likely that the Istanbul GP will be held in early June, while Bahrain, which will host the session to be held last Sunday and the first leg of the year, may have another race in October or November.
As it did last year, F1 is finding it difficult to leave Europe and the Middle East, where all the 2020 races were disputed, due to Kovid. Currently the first question on the calendar is the Canadian Grand Prix. As all people arriving in the country need to remain in quarantine for 14 days, this will destabilize the Canadian leg this year, unless some special plan can be in place, which is unlikely at the moment. The subsequent Azerbaijan GP is also not 100% confirmed. These are the only two non-European events on the F1 calendar until mid-September.
Doubt in late 2021
Sergio Perez celebrates victory at Sakhir G.P.
Picture: Disclosure / Formula 1
From there, the next major hurdles for F1 begin to meet the originally planned schedule of 23 steps, the longest in history. The five-configuration Bahrain racetrack, with a maximum graduation from the FIA (International Automobile Federation) required to host F1, may return to the calendar in the second half of the year. The concern is especially with the epidemic situation in Mexico and Brazil and travel restrictions in countries such as Japan, whose borders are currently closed, and Singapore, which does not allow entry of any recent ones. United Kingdom., The home country of most teams.
Since these determinations may change in the coming months with the advancement of vaccination, no announcement is made about the race for the second half anytime soon, but alternatives are already being explored.
This is bad news for F1, which tries to recover from a loss of more than 2 billion in the championship due to an epidemic last year, but is good for fans, as these four circuits are some of the options used in 2020. were as. The race was canceled due to the epidemic, and ended up generating separate races, as teams had little knowledge about them, and in the case of Portimo and Turkey, the track was removed before the race.
For the time being, the confirmed alternate stages are GPs at Imola, which will already be the second phase of the championship, which opened in Vietnam on that date (proof that it should have started last year and never happened) , And Portugal’s GP, which comes shortly after, replaces the Chinese Grand Prix, which will take place on 11 April and was postponed. In 2020, only nine of the 22 original stages were completed, but 17 stages in the championship were fine as F1 used alternate races and made more than one race on the same circuit.
