Portugal seeks return to schedule

Portugal’s Prime Minister, Luis Montenegro says the country is looking to host a round of the Formula One World Championship again.

Since first hosting a round of the Formula One World Championship in 1958, Portugal has hosted a further 17 grands prix, most recently when it came to the aid of the sport as it struggled to put together some sort of meaningful schedule in the midst of the pandemic… only, like so many others, to be shunned in the aftermath.

While most of those 18 races took place at Estoril, the first Portuguese Grand Prix was held at Boavista – a street circuit in Porto – before moving to Monsanto near Lisbon. It returned to Boavista in 1960 after which the sport wasn’t to return until 1984 at Estoril.

Popular with fans and drivers alike, Estoril lost the grand prix after failing to carry out upgrades demanded by the FIA in the wake of the fatal crashes at Imola in 1994 and a huge crash at the start of the 1995 race involving Ukyo Katayama and Luca Badoer.

Ironically, Ayrton Senna, who perished at Imola in 1994, scored his maiden F1 win at Estoril in 1985.

The races in 2020 and 2021 were held at the Portimao track in the Algarve, which has hosted a round of MotoGP since 2020.

“One of the circumstances that most contributes to promoting this region is major events,” said Prime Minister, Luis Montenegro at the Na Festa do Pontal. “We have secured the MotoGP, the world’s premier motorcycling event, for 2025 and 2026, and I can tell you that we have everything ready to formalise the return of Formula 1 to the Algarve next year, in 2027,” he added.

“These events require some financial effort on the part of the government,” he admitted, “but they have a direct financial return and an indirect promotional return that are, quite frankly, well worth it,” he insisted.

Other than the need to convince businesses to invest in the project however, Montenegro needs to convince F1 itself, which won’t be easy.

Other than the fact that the sport’s powers that be are increasingly turning away from Europe – until the next pandemic – there is the fact that street tracks in destination cities are the direction in which the sport is clearly heading.