Formula One’s new season will be a record-breaking 24 races long and will start on March 2 at the Bahrain Grand Prix.
There’s plenty of build-up to the first race, with teams designating time to unveil their new cars and colour schemes to the public, before three days of preseason testing, which often is the first indication of what the upcoming season might look like.
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Car launches
Here are the confirmed launches currently.
February 5 – Sauber, Williams
February 12 – Aston Martin
February 13 – Ferrari
Preseason testing
The Bahrain’s Sakhir International Circuit will host three days of testing on February 21-24, a week before the opening race at the same venue.
That choice of venue means cars and equipment will not need transporting between testing and the first race of the year, in line with the FIA’s efforts to make the championship more sustainable. Bahrain is also a venue which lends itself to more mileage for teams compared to previous testing venues such as Spain’s Circuit of the Catalunya at the same time of year.
The race schedule
For the first time ever, F1’s season will start on a Saturday in Bahrain. That race, and the follow-up event one week later in Saudi Arabia, have had their schedules shifted a day early to accomodate for the beginning of Ramadan.
It is a record calendar for F1 at 24 events. The returning Chinese Grand Prix, cancelled every year since 2020 due to COVID, and the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, which had to be scrapped in 2023 due to heavy flooding in the region, return to bring the calendar to a record number.
Las Vegas’ second race will also be held on a Saturday night, as it was in 2023.
There will be six events run under ‘sprint’ rules — where qualifying is held on Friday, followed by a day allocated to the sprint format, which has another qualifying event for a shorter race that afternoon, while Sunday is dedicated to the grand prix as normal.
Two American races, the Miami Grand Prix at the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium, and the U.S. Grand Prix at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas, will run under the sprint, as will the events in China, Austria, Brazil and Qatar. Last year, Max Verstappen secured his championship at the sprint in Qatar, one of a number of landmarks of his mind-blowing 2023…
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