On February 28 2026 the United States and Israel launched air strikes towards Iran, affecting other countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, who host back to back Formula 1 . These countries were forced to cancel their races due to the severe risk in the area. This change dropped the 2026 Formula season race count from 24 to 22 races.
The 2026 Formula 1 season began on March 7 in Melbourne, Australia. A week later on March 15 2026, the Chinese Grand Prix was raced, then two weeks after that the Japanese Grand Prix occurred. Formula 1 typically spreads their races out by 1-2 weeks at a time. Because of the cancellations of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, they now have an unexpected 5 week long break.
“Yeah, it sucked, a 5 week break just after the season began wasn’t good and it left a lot of time of no racing,” freshman Sebastian Ponce said. “But if it’s too dangerous, then it makes sense.”
“I did not like it because it felt so weird just to cancel races,” freshman Noah Tatasciore said.
Not only did the no racing for 5 weeks impact the fans around the world, but it heavily impacted Formula 1 itself along with all of the promoters due to losing a hefty amount of money. For each race in the middle east, Formula 1 typically makes around $100 million in revenue on a race weekend. However, they lost around $200 million because of the grand prix being cancelled. On top of that, the country’s economies in the city also took a massive blow because the hotels and local businesses usually make a lot of money on race weekends.
“I haven’t thought about the amount of money lost,” Ponce said. “That must have been very devastating to F1 and the cities.”
“They lost too much man, hopefully it doesn’t change how things operate now,” Tatasciore said.
When the International Automobile Federation (FIA) stated that the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia races were cancelled, they said that the races weren’t going to be held in April. This leaves a possibility for the race count to go from 22 to 24. It’s still most likely to be permanently cancelled, but this gives Formula 1 fans a sliver of hope for more races in the future for this year.
“The fact that they said ‘not in April’ is big because instead of the races being definitely done for the year, there is still hope that they could be raced,” Ponce said.
“Yeah, hopefully they reschedule them. It also seems a little unfair to the drivers to not give them 22 races to break records and instead only do 20.” said Tatasciore.
