Formula 1 chief executive Stefano Domenicali has said the championship is prepared to finish the 2026 season in Europe — even if it means a race in the snow.<\/p>\n
F1\u2019s season is currently scheduled to finish with races in Qatar on Nov. 29 and Abu Dhabi on Dec. 6, but both look increasingly unlikely to go ahead due to the war in Iran.<\/p>\n
F1 would need to rearrange at least one of those due to the commercial agreement it has with teams and broadcasters.<\/p>\n
Sources have told ESPN that Imola in northern Italy is the top of the list of contingencies should an alternate destination be needed.<\/p>\n
F1 is waiting until the middle of September before making a call on the final Middle East races, but it has already worked on a deal which saw the Bahrain Grand Prix relocated to Malaysia for Oct. 4 for the same reason.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are already sold out,\u201d Domenicali said about the Qatar and Abu Dhabi races. \u201cThat is an incredible sign of how much the sport is bigger than the problem that our world is living through.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut of course, if the situation will not be clearer the way that we believe it should be before middle of September, we will take the decision. And on that respect, I just want to confirm to you that if this will not be possible, the end of the season will be in Europe, because we cannot go in other places. So the end eventually will be in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Imola, Domenicali\u2019s hometown, returned as an F1 event during Covid and hosted the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix until last year.<\/p>\n
Weather would raise obvious concerns about hosting a race there in early December — at that time of year, average temperatures in the region are between 6-8\u00b0C, with heavy rainfall and even the chance of snow.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only possibility is to finish in Europe,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019m hoping that there will be no snow … Pirelli will not be ready to have the winter snow [tyres]… But now, seriously, I think that the weather should allow us to race in Europe even at the beginning of December.\u201d<\/p>\n
Domenicali said temperatures at a potential Imola finale would be no different to the conditions F1 drivers race with at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, which is the first race in the triple header with Qatar and Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cThe fascinating side is that if I look at the statistics of the temperature in Europe in that time, it\u2019s less cool than Las Vegas average temperature while we are racing. So no one knows what the temperature will be and what the weather will be like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Domenicali dismissed the idea of hosting a last-minute finale in the U.S., even though the paddock would already be in Las Vegas on Nov. 22.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will not do any other race in the U.S. … We are fighting the U.S. against NFL and we need to avoid any kind of situation that would put us in front of something that is still very big in the U.S.,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a possibility of having two races in Las Vegas, but we don\u2019t want to ruin a jewel that is growing by undervaluing what we are doing there.\u201d<\/p>\n
He later reiterated: \u201cI can guarantee you we won\u2019t do another race in the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n
Domenicali did not mention Austin\u2019s Circuit of the Americas by name, but it appears a very good option — a purpose-built facility in Texas, where weather will be much better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Formula 1 chief executive Stefano Domenicali has said the championship is prepared to finish the 2026 season in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[2571,49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":["post-834024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-auto-racing","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\/834024","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=834024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}