‘Forty-four hours door to door’: How flight chaos will affect Aus GP — and what it means for 2026 season

Formula 1 is scrambling to make it to Melbourne for this weekend’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix as airspace closures in the Middle East disrupt global travel.

The widening Middle Eastern conflict has forced at least eight nations to close their airspace, including the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, triggering the closure of major international airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha.

Those closures have grounded flights almost all flights operated by Emirates, Etihad and Qatar and caused heavy disruption for other airlines that transit through the region.

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Given the Middle East’s popularity as a transit corridor from Europe to Australia, the escalating situation has caused massive disruption to plans for the teams and F1 itself to make it to Melbourne for the first grand prix of the season.

They should not, however, impact the running of the race.

It’ll just take considerable lengths to make sure that’s the case.

F1 DOESN’T FLY COMMERCIAL

Formula 1 is too big to rely just on commercial aviation. Given the frenetic pace of the season, it just wouldn’t be viable.

For decades the sport has used a complex network for air and charted sea freight to complete the season.

Sea freight is dispatched from Europe in January and last year came via Doha before arriving in Melbourne well in advance of the race.

Equipment sent via sea can generally be described as non-competitive equipment — think things like hospitality infrastructure and garage signage. These things don’t evolve during the season or even season to season and therefore don’t need to return to the teams’ factories until the end of the year.

These items are manufactured in copies. Sea freight has arrived in Melbourne, but facsimiles of everything on-board are also on their way to Shanghai for next week’s race and to Suzuka for the grand prix later this month.

Sea freight from Melbourne will be forwarded to another non-European round, meaning at any given time during the year there are several ships carrying F1 equipment around the globe.

Competition-sensitive equipment is freighted via air on charter flights arranged by sponsor DHL.

This includes things like the cars themselves as well as the teams’ IT equipment. Broadcast equipment is also sent via the air, though much of F1’s television production now takes place remotely from the UK.

Even if these flights were bound for the Middle East when airspace was closed, they would be simply rerouted to avoid the affected areas — a convenience not afforded to those travelling commercial.

‘SCRAMBLING EVERYWHERE’ FOR A FLIGHT

Some Formula 1 and team personnel are also accommodated on charter flights, particularly between awkwardly scheduled races. When Azerbaijan and Singapore were held back-to-back, for example — not exactly a popular air route — F1 would charter a flight for some staff to ensure they’d reach Marina Bay as soon as possible.

But most of the Formula 1 circus cannot travel via charter. There simply isn’t the room.

For many members of the roadshow, the sudden travel disruption has had significant implications on their journey to Melbourne.

Teams will have worked hard to reroute staff, but not everyone has the benefit of a permanent travel department to work around such significant problems.

Paddock stalwart and Racer journalist Chris Medland was due to fly from London to Melbourne via Abu Dhabi on Sunday morning, but because both legs of his flight weren’t cancelled until just hours before his departure, he lost around a day in his attempt to reroute himself around the globe and has had to find his own way Down Under.

“It was a nightmare, because basically I was 24 hours behind anyone who was already scrambling,” he tells Fox Sports. “I just missed out on using Cathay Pacific — I was looking at it on the website and I’d need to be in the airport in about 15 minutes and I’m a 40-minute drive away.

“Then you’re just looking at all the options you can, and genuinely they were disappearing in front of my eyes.

“After I had exhausted them all, I worked out the best thing to do was make two separate bookings: fly to San Francisco and then fly to Melbourne via Sydney.

“I booked San Francisco, but by the time I went to book the Sydney flight, it had disappeared already.

“Then I was really panicking. The flights kept moving as I went. There was one via LA that looked good and then suddenly it wasn’t available or the price would jump up.

“There was one I could book on my phone that had a longer layover but was still decent but that was three times the price on the website. As I tried to do on my phone, it said it couldn’t process the booking because it had already gone.

“People were obviously scrambling everywhere, and that meant that you do rush a bit, you panic a little bit. I found it very difficult.”

He ended up with convoluted four-leg flight taking him from London to San Francisco, Nadi and Brisbane. He’s set to arrive in Melbourne on Tuesday night.

“It’ll be about 44 hours door to door,” he says.

“It’s gone crazy. I haven’t seen anyone yet have such a stupid route as me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some do at the rate it’s going, so I might not be the only one come the end of it.

“Once you realise that options are dwindling, you end up pushing the button on one and sucking it up, so that’s what I’ve done.

“You look at some of the prices and think it’s just not worth it, but then you also think, ‘Well, I might not get there at all’, and that’s going to cost way more money not to be out here freelancer.”

Some less enterprising media companies, however, will inevitably choose to take the refund and not send their reporters to the race.

Formula 1 hasn’t experienced this sort of disruption since Covid — though, even then, it was more about getting home from the abandoned Australian Grand Prix — or the 2010 Iceland volcanic eruption closed European airspace for more than a week straight and then intermittently for another fortnight.

WHAT ABOUT THE NEXT RACES?

Australia is back-to-back with China this year, a win not only for the efficiency of logistics but also for the odds of the Chinese Grand Prix taking place, with Formula 1 travelling directly to Shanghai from Melbourne, avoiding any Middle Eastern disruption. Most will travel directly from Shanghai to home in Europe too.

The Japanese Grand Prix follows on 29 March, but as a stand-alone grand prix, a direct flight from Europe to Tokyo, Osaka or Nagoya will avoid potential ongoing disruption.

Next, however, comes the Middle Eastern double-header of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian grands prix on 12 and 19 April respectively.

Bahraini airspace is closed, although most of Saudi Arabia, including Jeddah, is currently open.

These races are more than a month away. The situation is likely to change significantly between now and then. It’s impossible to know whether it will be more or less likely that these races will be able to go ahead.

It is instructive, however, to consider what few past examples we have of Formula 1 racing amid similar tensions.

The 2011 Bahrain Grand Prix was called off during the Arab Spring, but only when the country itself requested postponement in response to massive nationwide protests.

Formula 1 and the FIA attempted to reschedule the race later in the season, but agreement on an alternative slot couldn’t be found — logistics are delicately planned months in advance — and the race was abandoned.

The grand prix was reinstated in 2012 despite reports of ongoing protest and violence in the country.

Consider, alternatively, the 2022 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, which took place despite a Houthi rocket attack on an oil facility around 11 kilometres from the track during the weekend’s first practice session.

The second practice session was delayed for an emergency driver briefing, and the drivers met again at the end of the day to discuss whether to boycott the rest of the round.

Talks ran late into the night, but local organisers were firm that the race could continue safely. The sport resolved to complete the weekend, and no further incident was reported.

Some speculated that the future of the race would be called into question afterwards, but Saudi Arabia had been in conflict with the Yemeni Houthi forces since 2015, long before the kingdom first hosted a grand prix, and the conflagration continues to this day. The race remains on the calendar.

A parallel can also be drawn with the 2020 Australian Grand Prix, the first race cancelled during the pandemic. The sport had already arrived in Melbourne when several paddock personnel were quarantined with Covid symptoms, including from McLaren, which withdrew from the weekend. The sport took the position, however, that one or more teams electing not to compete would not force the cancellation of a race despite the backdrop of the spreading pandemic.

A legal stand-off ensued between the sport and local organisers about pulling the trigger for cancellation. It took all but three teams withdrawing — and the flying home of several drivers before a decision had been formally made — for F1 to back down and wear the cost of cancellation.

Historically, then, Formula 1 only cancels races when logistically impossible or when the host nation itself declares the event unviable.

It’s too soon to say today whether either condition will be met for any races this season.

The sport says it is closely monitoring the situation, as it was last year when tensions briefly appeared to cast some doubt on the season-ending Qatar and Abu Dhabi grands prix. Contingency plans were made, but both races went ahead as scheduled.