The Name That Travelled
On Sunday morning, at ten o’clock Israel time, the Bahrain Grand Prix will start in Malaysia. Sport 5+ Live has it in the schedule from a quarter to ten, under the name Bahrain, and nobody at the channel needs to correct the listing. The listing is right. This is the Bahrain Grand Prix. It is simply not in Bahrain.
The explanation is short. The race was due at Sakhir on 12 April. The conflict in the region made that impossible and the date was lost. In July it was announced that the round would be run instead at the Sepang International Circuit, outside Kuala Lumpur, on 4 October, keeping its name under an agreement between Formula One, the governing body and the two governments. This is not a column about the conflict. It is about what happens to a name when the place it belongs to cannot be reached.
A good deal has changed. Sakhir has been a night race since 2014, run under floodlights in the desert, and it reaches Israeli screens in the early evening. Sepang runs at three in the afternoon, in tropical daylight, which puts the start at ten on a Sunday morning here. Sunday in Israel is a working day. So a race that usually belongs to the sofa will be watched this year on a phone propped against a coffee cup, with one eye on the door. The hazard has changed too. At Sakhir it is sand blowing across the track. At Sepang it is water. The 2009 race there was stopped by a storm and never restarted, and the drivers went home with half points.
A good deal has not changed. The teams are the same and so is the championship. The points count exactly as they would have counted in April. Kimi Antonelli arrives leading the championship, with his Mercedes teammate George Russell 66 points behind after winning in Baku by a tenth of a second, and neither of them will care what the trophy is called. There is even a continuity of authorship. Hermann Tilke, the German engineer who has drawn much of the modern calendar, designed Sepang for its opening in 1999 and then designed Sakhir, which held its first race in 2004. The grand prix has moved from one of his rooms to another.
And something has been given back. Malaysia last held a grand prix in 2017, when a young Max Verstappen took the second win of his career. Nine years is a long time in a sport that replaces its cars every season. Twelve of the 22 drivers have never started a grand prix there. A circuit that had every reason to think its day was over has its sport again for a weekend, on the strength of somebody else’s name. That seems to me the most cheerful fact in the whole arrangement. One room has emptied and another, long empty, has filled.
Israel is a natural audience for this, because Israel has only ever known the grand prix from a distance. No Israeli has started a Formula One race. The national record consists of practice sessions. Chanoch Nissany drove a Minardi in first practice at the 2005 Hungarian Grand Prix, on his 42nd birthday, and ended the session nearly thirteen seconds off the fastest time. He has said he remains proud of it, as he should. His son Roy became a Williams test driver and in 2020 took part in first practice at the Spanish Grand Prix, which he described as a national achievement because he was carrying the flag. It is a short record, a father and a son and a few Friday mornings, but it is theirs, and it was noticed here. And yet the Sports Channel shows every round, and people here set alarms for Melbourne and Las Vegas. Attachment, it turns out, does not require presence.
The method, for anything that has to be kept going away from home, is simple enough. You keep the name. You keep the date as near as you can. You keep the form, down to the anthem and the podium. Then you wait, and in the meantime you do the thing properly wherever you happen to be.
The small lesson is about what an institution decides is essential. There were three options this year. The race could be deleted, renamed, or moved. Deleting was the easy choice and was in fact the first one: the calendar simply shrank. Renaming would have been the tidy choice, and nobody would have objected to a Malaysian Grand Prix. Moving it and keeping the name was the awkward one, and Bahrain is the reason it happened. Under the agreement Bahrain remains the host in name, sets the ticket prices and keeps the proceeds. So this is not sentiment on Formula One’s part. It is a host deciding that its race was worth keeping even when it could not be kept at home. The arrangement confuses the casual viewer and needs a paragraph of explanation in every preview. It also says something that the other two options do not, which is that the fixture is still owed.
A calendar is a list of promises. Most of the time nobody notices, because the promises are kept in the obvious way, in the obvious place. It takes a year like this one to show which part of the promise was the place and which part was the name.
On Sunday evening the grandstand at Sakhir will be empty, and the floodlights will have no race to light. The room is empty. The name is not. It is out on the road, doing its work on a hot afternoon somewhere else, and it has kept the door open behind it.