F1 Hot Topic | Middle East Conflict | 163 | When War Comes to the Calendar

War broke out in the Middle East on Saturday, when the US and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran. Iran retaliated with missiles and drones targeting Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan, countries that together host four races on the 2026 Formula 1 calendar. The Pirelli wet-weather test in Bahrain was cancelled, Gulf carriers were grounded, and F1 personnel were scrambling to reroute to Australia by any path available. By Monday afternoon, Joe Saward, one of Formula 1's most independent journalists was in a Dallas airport lounge, rerouted from France around closed Gulf airspace, after filing his JSBM newsletter analysis.

In this episode, Joe walks us through what the sport is actually facing:

• Why Formula 1 improvises brilliantly in a crisis
• The real decision-making hierarchy: who actually makes the call to cancel a Grand Prix
• Why the FIA is largely irrelevant in a commercial crisis
• The Russia parallel: when F1 cancelled its Russian GP contract overnight after the Ukraine invasion, it established a standard. Joe asks the uncomfortable question about what that standard means now
• His own 40-year read on covering this sport through the Gulf War, 9/11, COVID, and the 2022 Houthi strike near Jeddah

Sabrina brings the policy lens: arguing that sport's governance framework was never designed to handle a situation where a geopolitical actor and a commercial partner are the same country, a structural problem regardless of who started what. She also drives the business and legal elements: geopolitical cancellation insurance, force majeure in hosting contracts, whether the legal framework is any clearer after Covid, and what the soft power narrative of Gulf sport hosting looks like when the countries doing the hosting are being struck by missiles.

Dick, joining late from just across “the Texas border”, adds the grounding note the conversation needs: at the end of the day, this is still just the game, and Liberty Media has enough business sense not to put people in danger for a race.

Check out Joe online: 

• JSBM Newsletter
• Grand Prix+
• The Green Notebook

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