Imola out for Madrid as 2026 F1 calendar revealed

Commercial rightsholder FOM and governing body the FIA have jointly revealed the 2026 Formula 1 calendar, which will again feature 24 race weekends.

The season starts on 8 March in Melbourne with the Australian Grand Prix and finishes in Abu Dhabi on 6 December.

As previously reported, the Ramadan holiday means Australia once again hosts the season opener instead of Bahrain.

After the 8 March curtain raiser in Melbourne’s Albert Park, F1 heads to China for a double-header with Shanghai. Unlike this year, Japan will be a standalone event, creating a gap before the more conventional double-header of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Canadian Grand Prix to clash with Indianapolis 500

The most notable changes compared to the 2025 calendar appear in May. As previously announced, Montreal’s Canadian Grand Prix will move forward to improve freight logistics with Miami. But the three-week gap still means both races are standalone, and Canada will now clash with the running of the Indianapolis 500 on 24 May.

That gap has partly been created by removing Imola’s Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, which could not renew its contract and is now officially dropping off the calendar for the time being.

The Monaco Grand Prix has been shuffled back to the first weekend of June after moving away from its traditional end-of-May date to accommodate F1’s desire to run Miami and Canada closer together, followed by the yet to be named Barcelona race – which is losing the Spanish Grand Prix moniker to Madrid, but still has one more race left on its current contract.

The rest of the pre-summer break schedule remains largely unchanged until the Hungarian Grand Prix at the end of July, which spells the end of the first half of the season.

The campaign then picks back up for the final Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, followed by a double-header of Italy and Spain, the latter moving to a hybrid street circuit in Madrid.

As had been the case in 2024, the season finishes with six race weekends in seven weeks due to two triple-headers. An American run of Austin, Mexico and Brazil is then followed by Las Vegas, Qatar and Abu Dhabi to round out the year.

F1 is expected to continue with six sprint events in 2026, with three three-days tests planned in Barcelona and Bahrain to give teams and manufacturers more time to get up to speed with next year’s all-new cars and power units.

2026 F1 calendar