This weekend’s edition of Formula 1, the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, is perhaps the most obvious example, but F1 is not unfamiliar with hosting races named for other places. Although, this practice seems to have fallen out of favour in the last decade or so.

We saw almost the opposite during the 2020 covid scramble, with races being rebranded as their region instead of country, eg. the Styrian GP, and the Tuscan GP. Also the 70^th Anniversary GP instead of English GP, which would have sounded ultra nationalistic. And, indeed, we’ve also seen recently Imola return to the race calendar as the Emilia-Romagna GP.

In the early 2000s, when I was new F1 fan, I stayed up late watching the San Marino Grand Prix where the cars were actually racing at Imola, which is in a different country. (I partially credit this with my longstanding fascination with maps.) But, it’s still only about 90km down the road. An easy drive away, not an 8 hour flight.

Perhaps the most recent example is the 2016 European Grand Prix being held in Azerbaijan (hey, we were just there!) which shares a border with Iran, and, coincidentally, is about the same longitude as Bahrain. This is moving into Eurovision understandings of geography, which includes everyone’s favourite European countries Israel and Australia.

The title of European Grand Prix was long used to host a second race in a country that was already regularly hosting an F1 race. But this means the tally of previous winners becomes almost meaningless, as the race was seldom held at the same track for long. We saw this happening a couple of weeks ago when F1 rolled into Madrid and we had endless talk about the various drivers who have previously won the Spanish Grand Prix, nevermind that we were at an entirely new circuit no one had ever raced at before.

Running the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia is a new level of Grand Prix of Some Place Else. I don’t know if anyone from San Marino was involved in the San Marino GPs that were never held in San Marino, but the team from the Bahrain International Circuit have been closely involved in the new iteration at the Sepang circuit. They’ve even brought out marshals and food stalls.

There’s a lot at stake, of course; F1 race hosting rights are sought after and fought over and there’s a lot of money sloshing around in this sport, but its uncouth to talk about it. It’s also uncouth to talk about war and “regional instability” which is how we got here in the first place. (I’ll leave it as a challenge to the reader to discern what and where I mean by ‘here’ in this context.)

But hey, what we’ve learned from this is if the Bahrain GP can be held about 6000 km away from Bahrain itself, there’s hope we can finally get some overtaking at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Given a generous limit 6000km, where would you want to see the Monaco Grand Prix held? If you want to share your thoughts, you can email me: [email protected] (Seriously, I’d be thrilled to hear from you.)