The calendar: when and where the season runs

Published Invalid Date · figures as of the 2026 season.

The 2026 season runs from March to December with 23 rounds on this site’s calendar, six of them sprint weekends. Races are grouped by region to limit travel, and the start times follow local afternoons, which is why a season’s races start at every hour of the European day and night.

The shape of a season

March to April: Australia, then Asia and the Middle East.
May to September: Europe, with Canada and Miami fitted in.
October to December: the Americas, then the Middle East for the finale in Abu Dhabi.

The calendar page lists every round with its date and sessions, and the home page counts down to the next session. Each race page gives the five session times in UTC and converts them to your own time zone; a preview of the weekend appears there once the previous race is over.

Start times

A race usually starts at 15:00 local time in Europe, 14:00 or 15:00 in the Americas, and at times chosen for European television elsewhere: Japan at 14:00 local (05:00 UTC), Singapore at 20:00 local (12:00 UTC), Las Vegas at 20:00 local (04:00 UTC). A night race is simply a race under floodlights at a local evening hour; the site’s calendar shows each start in UTC so that the pattern is visible.

Race length

A Grand Prix is the smallest number of complete laps that exceeds 305 km, with Monaco the exception at about 260 km. That gives between 44 laps at Spa-Francorchamps, the longest circuit in current use at 7.004 km, and 78 laps at Monaco, the shortest at 3.337 km. A race also has a time limit of two hours of racing and three hours in total if it is stopped. The 2026 races so far have run from 44 laps (Belgium) to 78 (Monaco).

How the calendar has grown

Season	Rounds
1950	7
1970	13
1990	16
2010	19
2024	24
2026	23

The Indianapolis 500 counted for the world championship from 1950 to 1960 without most Grand Prix drivers taking part; this site leaves it out of streak records, as is standard practice, and says so on each record page.

Circuits

78 circuits have held a championship race; 23 are on the 2026 calendar. Each circuit page gives the races held, the winners, the lap record, and for the 40 circuits with a GPS trace a lap map with the official turn numbers and a table of every corner. The circuits index compares them by how often pole position wins.