Formula 1 is set to cancel April’s races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia due to the ongoing Iran war, sources confirmed to ESPN.<\/p>\n
F1 was due to race in Bahrain on April 12 and in Saudi Arabia on April 19.<\/p>\n
Both countries have been struck during Iran’s response after the United States and Israel launched a wave of attacks on Iran.<\/p>\n
Despite not knowing whether the conflict would be ongoing by the time their event dates roll around, a decision needed to be made imminently due to the logistics of when teams had to start sending freight to the Middle East for both events.<\/p>\n
Formula 1 will not race in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia in April.\u00a0GettyImages<\/p>\n
It is highly unlikely the races in the Middle East will be replaced, given the schedule at the back end of the year is tightly packed.<\/p>\n
Without knowing when the conflict will end or whether there will be escalations in the conflict down the line, F1 does not want to be in a position where a championship is decided or influenced by a race being canceled at the end of the calendar.<\/p>\n
That would mean the 2026 schedule being reduced from 24 to 22 races and a five-week void between the third round of the new season in Japan on March 29 and the Miami Grand Prix on May 3.<\/p>\n
Speaking in Shanghai on Thursday ahead of this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton expressed faith in F1 to make the right decision.<\/p>\n
He said: “I know that [F1 CEO] Stefano [Domenicali] will do what is right for all of us and the sport.<\/p>\n
“That is the great thing with having a great leader like him.”<\/p>\n
PA contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Formula 1 is set to cancel April’s races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia due to the ongoing Iran…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-534197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}