This is an update of a post from 5th August 2018. At that time, it was the summer break and I thought it would be interesting to see how far the F1 calendar deviated from the most efficient possible order if you were trying to reduce travelling distance.
Since then, very little has changed – Mercedes keep winning everything and the smaller teams continue to complain that the amount of travelling hikes up their costs and makes their lives even more difficult, also, the engineers would like to see their families occasionally.
F1’s response to this is … to add two more races.
Despite the way that sounds, I am looking forward to the two new races (Vietnam and Netherlands) but I wanted to see whether they’d been slotted into the F1 calendar in places that made sense. I used the same app as previously (https://gallery.shinyapps.io/shiny-salesman/). I used Amsterdam as the location for the Dutch Grand Prix because Amsterdam is the city nearest to Zandvoort. (All of this was calculated pre-Coronavirus.)
The most efficient calendar can be seen below:
The order is Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Russia, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Monaco, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Britain, Canada, United States, Mexico and Brazil.
17 of the 22 are in a different place to the real calendar. The ones that are the same are Australia, Vietnam, China, Azerbaijan and Austria.
Of the 17 that are different, 8 of them involve crossing to a different continent that the “most efficient” and 9 involve being on a different continent than the race before.
I still think F1 is making life unnecessarily difficult for itself, the teams and for the logistics staff. I suspect Abu Dhabi at the end of the season is unavoidable for contractual reasons, but I really don’t understand why they have the Canadian GP in the middle of the summer which involves two hops across the Atlantic that could be avoided. I think moving the Canadian Grand Prix to later in the year to when everyone is already in that part of the world for the US, Mexican and Brazilian Grand Prix would help enormously.
Since then, very little has changed – Mercedes keep winning everything and the smaller teams continue to complain that the amount of travelling hikes up their costs and makes their lives even more difficult, also, the engineers would like to see their families occasionally.
F1’s response to this is … to add two more races.
Despite the way that sounds, I am looking forward to the two new races (Vietnam and Netherlands) but I wanted to see whether they’d been slotted into the F1 calendar in places that made sense. I used the same app as previously (https://gallery.shinyapps.io/shiny-salesman/). I used Amsterdam as the location for the Dutch Grand Prix because Amsterdam is the city nearest to Zandvoort. (All of this was calculated pre-Coronavirus.)
The most efficient calendar can be seen below:
The order is Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, China, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Russia, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Monaco, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Britain, Canada, United States, Mexico and Brazil.17 of the 22 are in a different place to the real calendar. The ones that are the same are Australia, Vietnam, China, Azerbaijan and Austria.
Of the 17 that are different, 8 of them involve crossing to a different continent that the “most efficient” and 9 involve being on a different continent than the race before.
I still think F1 is making life unnecessarily difficult for itself, the teams and for the logistics staff. I suspect Abu Dhabi at the end of the season is unavoidable for contractual reasons, but I really don’t understand why they have the Canadian GP in the middle of the summer which involves two hops across the Atlantic that could be avoided. I think moving the Canadian Grand Prix to later in the year to when everyone is already in that part of the world for the US, Mexican and Brazilian Grand Prix would help enormously.
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