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How F1’s 60-degree sweatbox saved the ‘Bahrain’ Grand Prix: Insider’s Guide
The rescheduled national race of Bahrain won’t take place at the usual desert Sakhir circuit, nor will it take place under lights. Instead it will take place just a short 7.5-hour, 6000km flight to the east, at Malaysia’s Sepang International Circuit.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2026 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K.It will still be searingly hot, but it will also be oppressively humid. It will feature long straights and big stops, but it will also comprise fast sweeps and soaring bends.
A new circuit for the majority of the grid and sure to be the season’s most challenging conditions, this will be no ordinary Bahrain Grand Prix. This is far from the first time a race has been hosted in one country while taking the name of another. The most famous is Imola in Italy hosting the San Marino Grand Prix between 1981 and 2006 while Monza hosted the Italian Grand Prix.
Germany’s Nürburgring hosted two races known as the Luxembourg Grand Prix in years Hockenheim had the rights to the German Grand Prix. The European Grand Prix has rotated between races in Germany, Spain, the UK and, most ambitiously, Azerbaijan. It’s not unique to Formula 1 either. The Dakar Rally hasn’t been to the Senegalese capital since 2007, moving to South America in 2009–19 and then to Saudi Arabia in 2020.
PODCAST: George Russell wins the Azerbaijan Grand Prix after Kimi Antonelli crashes out of qualifying, but has he reignited his title hopes or simply delayed the inevitable? |The Bahrain Grand Prix — along with the race in Saudi Arabia — were called off from their original April dates after US and Israeli strikes on Iran conflagrated into a regional war.
But F1 was careful to describe neither as cancelled, with the sport hopeful one or the other could be reinstated later in the year. This weekend, between Azerbaijan and Singapore, was the logical — and only — option, and after a ceasefire agreement was signed in June, the sport prepared to announce Bahrain was back on. F1, though, wanted to run a race all the same.
Several TV contracts reportedly require at least 22 grands prix in a season, and an extra race would safeguard against Abu Dhabi and Qatar being called off too. Malaysia emerged as an obvious candidate given its proximity to next week’s Singapore Grand Prix, but given the short time frame, there was no real willingness from Malaysian authorities to pay and promote a race.
Instead an agreement was reached with Bahrain, Malaysia and F1 for the Sakhir organisers to effectively hire the track and host the race as if it were home. As a result, Formula 1 will be able to honour contracts for trackside signage, hospitality and other income streams it would otherwise have lost — along with keeping its TV deals safe — while Bahrain retains the marketing value of hosting a grand prix, including for its national airline, which will sponsor the event.
Sepang International Circuit had its genesis in Malaysia’s 1990s economic boom, with a purpose-built motorsport venue envisaged as a centrepiece of the country’s rapid modernisation. It was good timing, with then F1 CEO Bernie Ecclestone looking east to expand F1’s global footprint to tap into Asia’s massive and mostly untapped population. Herman Tilke was contracted to design and construct the circuit. The German architect is now well known in the motorsport world, but Sepang was his first clean-slate project.
More than 9 million cubic metres of earth were moved around a 26-hectare former oil palm plantation to create a bowl, allowing good sightlines of most of the circuit from almost anywhere in the venue. Tilke recognised the direction Formula 1 was travelling in the 1990s, with cars getting faster and growing wider by the year.
The narrowest part of Sepang is 16 metres, and the track comprises two long straights, both of which terminate in heavy braking zones to encourage passing. Those long straights are emblematic of the track, but its challenge is in the fast sweeps through the middle sector, where a modern high-downforce Formula 1 car is put through its paces.
These corners make the track a real tyre killer, with multiple stops routinely required to make it to the finish, even with a healthy amount of management — though it will be interesting to see what the current generation of Pirelli rubber makes of it. Unlike Singapore, which is run under floodlights after sunset, Malaysia is a daytime race.
The ambient temperature is usually in the mid-30s, with the humidity at around 80 per cent — and these punishing climes become positively vindictive when the unforgiving sun breaks through the clouds. Cockpit temperatures rush past 50°C and can nudge an inhuman 60°C in the right mix of weather. Now imagine wearing three layers of dense, heavy fireproof clothing for a marathon 305km grand prix distance.
Now add in the perpetual risk of heavy rain that’s regularly mixed up the grid and the race outcome. The 2009 Malaysian Grand Prix was called off entirely after only a few laps due to unabating monsoonal conditions. Now you can begin to understand why this circuit tended to produce interesting and unpredictable racing.
Malaysia’s return may have been because Malaysia is a port of convenience at this part of the schedule, but this weekend is sure to be more than just a stopgap event. Despite the success of Malaysia as a race, the event struggled to draw a crowd in the years before dropping off the calendar after its 2017 edition. To understand why Malaysia and F1 parted company, you have to understand the place F1 was in before the pandemic.
“I myself am not able to sit in front of the television and watch from lap 1 until whatever lap two hours. “It’s hard to sell this kind of event and to get bums on the seat … and it’s not worth the investment at the moment. ““What changes have you seen that makes it any more exciting than in the Bernie days, in terms of the sport, in terms of racing, what have they done? ” he said.
“Fans engagement, yes. What they have done off-track … it’s great but what triggers for someone to buy tickets to come to the circuit? This was a time the sport was still gripped by Mercedes near total domination, the team having won 60 of the previous 73 races before the 2017 Malaysian Grand Prix. Other teams were winning an average of just over three times a year.
It was also a time of financial precarity, with three teams having folded in the previous five seasons and several other teams up against the wall. Still, the interview precipitated an extraordinary press conference with the Malaysian prime minister, Razali and F1 top brass to smooth the waters.is much heralded for bringing the sport back into the mainstream, but less celebrated are the financial controls that saved the teams and the new approach to sponsorship and monetisation that has flushed its coffers and boosted prize money.
Liberty’s approach isn’t universally loved, and there have been mistakes and false moves — F1 briefly had a line of fragrances that have been long forgotten — but anyone who thinks the sport is in worse shape today than a decade ago is kidding themselves. Because while Razali pointed to genuine problems with the sport, his claim that Sepang wouldn’t host F1 even if it were free has been proved wrong all these years later.
HOW MANY DRIVERS HAVE RACED THERE? Fitness will be a factor in this race, but given conditions are similar to Singapore, the timing of the event is ideal. Until this year, Singapore has been the most extreme event from a fitness perspective, meaning effectively it’s the race all training is designed for.
Malaysia arriving at the same time will mean the drivers are ready — although backing up for Singapore just a few days later could make the street race more of a slog than usual. More than half the drivers have never competed in Malaysia, but a surprisingly large minority have done.
Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, Pierre Gasly, Nico Hülkenberg, Esteban Ocon, Carlos Sainz, Fernando Alonso, Lance Stroll, Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez have all entered at least one race in Sepang. : Sebastian Vettel Most of the experience is concentrated among those in the least competitive seats, with seven of the bottom eight regular drivers having been here before.
As a remarkable quirk, seven of the top 10 have never raced here, including title leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli and his teammate George Russell. Among the active drivers, only Alonso has won this race more than once, tasting victory in 2005, 2007 and 2012. Could prior knowledge be an advantage this weekend? It’s unusual for the sport to return to a track like this, but the 2020 pandemic calendar might give us a few hints.
Istanbul returned for the first time since 2011. All three podium-getters in 2020 had competed at the venue before. Hamilton, a previous Türkiye winner, claimed victory. The Nürburgring had been off the calendar since 2013 when it made its one-off comeback.
Two of the three podium-getters had been there before. Hamilton — again, a previous victor — won the race. F1 hadn’t raced in Imola since 2006. Kimi Räikkönen was the only returning driver, and his ninth-place finish was his equal best result of the season and one of his only two points-scoring finishes for the year.
WILL WE GET THE REAL BAHRAIN GRAND PRIX NEXT SEASON? The good news for fans of the Bahrain Grand Prix — the true Bahrain Grand Prix, the one that takes place in Bahrain — is that it’s scheduled to take place just over five months from now, on 14 March. The war that had Bahrain called off in the first place continues even today.
Nearby Qatar and Abu Dhabi are still listed as the season-closing races for this season, but there is considerable doubt about whether they’ll go ahead. Imola has been given the go-ahead to begin building infrastructure to hold a contingency finale on 6 December, though Formula 1 has pushed back its deadline for a final decision until later this month, sometime after the Singapore Grand Prix. The situation is complex.
The list of sports and other major events that have been called off is long, but organisers in Qatar and Abu Dhabi insist that the region is safe and that both races can go ahead. The UK foreign office no longer advises against travel to either country — or to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia — which could be influential given government warnings come with insurance implications. It warns, though, that the conflict “remains unpredictable”.
However, the United States — and F1 is owned by an American company and is traded on New York’s Nasdaq — lists all four of the sport’s Middle Eastern destinations with a category 3 warning to reconsider travel. For what it’s worth, Australia advises against all travel to Bahrain. Travellers to the other three nations are advised to reconsider.
But Formula 1 is determined to give the region as much time as possible to be as convincing as possible that the races can go ahead. It also won’t want to blink first in cancelling, knowing it would require forfeiting its sanctioning fee. If F1 calls off Qatar and Abu Dhabi, and if there is no material change in the situation before January, it will find itself doing this geopolitical dance again next year with its season-opening rounds.
If Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are called off, China is tipped to open the season, with Japan and then Australia following.
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