Why F1 Still Hasn’t Pulled the Plug on Qatar and Abu Dhabi

For months, the paddock has operated on an assumption that has hardened into something close to conventional wisdom: with conflict continuing to destabilise the wider Middle East, Formula 1’s season-closing double-header in Qatar and Abu Dhabi surely can’t survive on the calendar in its current form. Yet here we are, deep into the year, and no cancellation has been announced. No alternative venue has been unveiled. The races remain, officially, exactly where they were when the 2024 calendar was first published. The gap between expectation and action has become the story in itself — and understanding why requires looking past the obvious safety framing and into the commercial architecture that actually governs how Formula 1 makes decisions like this.

What’s Actually Happening

The situation, as reported, is one of drift rather than decision. There has been no formal statement from Formula 1 or the FIA suggesting either race is under review, let alone in jeopardy. Behind the scenes, though, the working assumption among people close to the sport has been that continuing to stage grands prix in the region — particularly with Qatar sitting geographically and politically close to the conflict’s centre of gravity — carries a risk profile that eventually becomes untenable. That assumption has not yet translated into movement, and the widening gap between what insiders expect and what officials are prepared to confirm is itself telling.

This is not how Formula 1 has behaved in comparable situations before. The sport dropped the Russian Grand Prix within days of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, tearing up a long-term contract with Igor Levitin’s promoters and absorbing the financial consequences almost instantly. That precedent is precisely why the current inertia over Qatar and Abu Dhabi looks so conspicuous by comparison. If F1 could move decisively then, why the hesitation now?

Why It Matters

The answer lies substantially in what these two races represent commercially, which is categorically different from what Russia represented. The Qatar Grand Prix is not simply a promoter paying a sanctioning fee for the right to host a round of the championship — it sits inside a broader, long-term partnership between Formula 1 and Qatar Airways, one that extends well beyond a single race weekend into title sponsorship territory and wider commercial alignment. Abu Dhabi, for its part, is the championship’s traditional season finale, a race that has occupied that slot for over a decade and carries with it the logistical and broadcast weight of being the sport’s closing statement each year. Unpicking either commitment is not comparable to walking away from a one-off promoter deal; it means unwinding contracts, sponsorship obligations and calendar architecture that have been built up over years.

There is also a harder political reality underpinning F1’s caution. The sport has spent the last decade deepening its commercial and cultural footprint across the Gulf — through Saudi Arabia’s entry, Qatar’s arrival, Abu Dhabi’s long tenure and Bahrain’s status as an early-season fixture. Sponsorship income, hospitality investment and state-backed commercial partnerships from the region now run through Formula 1’s business in a way that didn’t exist a generation ago. A cancellation, however well justified on safety grounds, risks being read by hosts and partners in the region not as a neutral risk assessment but as a statement — one with diplomatic and commercial consequences that extend well beyond the two events in question. Liberty Media, as the sport’s commercial rights holder, has to weigh that regional relationship in its entirety, not just the discrete question of whether it’s safe to hold a race weekend in Lusail or Yas Marina in December.

The Wider Context: A Divided Paddock

Lewis Hamilton’s comments add a genuinely interesting counterweight to the prevailing narrative. Where much of the surrounding conversation has treated cancellation as close to a moral inevitability, Hamilton — a driver who has never been shy about taking positions on geopolitical and social issues — has struck a more contrarian note on whether F1 should actually withdraw from the Middle East at season’s end. That matters because it complicates the tidy story of a paddock united in expecting the races to be pulled. Drivers occupy a peculiar position in these debates: they are the ones physically present at the venues, but they are also employees of teams — Ferrari in Hamilton’s case — that have their own commercial relationships with the region and limited appetite for their drivers freelancing on foreign policy. His stance is a reminder that opinion within the sport itself is less uniform than the outside commentary sometimes suggests, and that the question of whether F1 should race in the Middle East is not simply a binary of safety versus profit.

GP Headlines’ Take

Formula 1’s silence on Qatar and Abu Dhabi isn’t evidence of indifference to the situation in the region — it’s evidence of just how entangled the sport’s finances have become with the Gulf states that have bankrolled a significant share of its recent growth. The Russia precedent shows the sport can act decisively when the commercial exposure is limited and the political consensus is overwhelming. Neither condition currently applies here. Until the FIA and Formula 1 face a genuine operational trigger — a direct safety threat to competitors, teams or spectators at either venue — rather than an ambient sense of regional instability, expect the calendar to stay as published. That may prove to be the right call, or it may prove to be a decision made too late. But it will not be paralysis; it will be a considered, if uncomfortable, judgement that the commercial cost of walking away currently outweighs the political cost of staying.