The 2020 Formula 1 season was supposed to begin a new chapter. Teams had spent months developing updated machinery under revised technical regulations, drivers were primed, and the global audience was ready. Then the world stopped. The COVID-19 pandemic swept across continents in early 2020, and with it came the most severe disruption to the Formula 1 calendar since World War II. Races were cancelled, schedules were shredded, and the sport entered an extended and deeply uncertain silence. Among the casualties were the Bahrain and Vietnamese Grands Prix, two events that would never take place in their originally intended form. But what if they had?
A Season That Never Got Started
Formula 1 confirmed the postponement of multiple early-season rounds in March 2020, with FIA and Formula 1 management working alongside promoters in a scramble to salvage what they could of the calendar. The Australian Grand Prix had already been controversially cancelled at the eleventh hour, and Bahrain and Vietnam quickly followed. For a sport that runs on precision and certainty, the chaos was jarring.
What made the situation particularly compelling from a competitive standpoint was that teams had already completed pre-season testing before the cancellations hit. Lap times had been set, car concepts had been revealed, and a pecking order was beginning to take shape. There was just enough data to ask the question seriously: how would these races have played out?
Bahrain: A Circuit That Rewards Raw Power and Precision
The Bahrain International Circuit has long been one of the most revealing venues on the calendar. Its mix of high-speed straights, technical middle sector, and punishing tyre demands tends to expose weaknesses in both car and driver in equal measure. Under the floodlights of Sakhir, the 2020 grid would have faced its first real competitive test of the new regulations.
Based on pre-season testing data and the direction of car development heading into that year, Mercedes remained the benchmark. Lewis Hamilton had ended 2019 in dominant form, and the W11 had shown signs during testing of being a generational leap in performance. Ferrari, by contrast, had arrived in Barcelona with a car that already looked compromised, their straight-line advantage from the prior season diminished amid ongoing controversy over their power unit.
Red Bull and Max Verstappen represented the most credible threat on paper. Bahrain’s layout historically suits a car with strong aerodynamic balance through the medium-speed corners, and the RB16 had shown flashes of genuine pace in testing. But reliability concerns and the team’s tendency toward early-season setup struggles made a race win speculative at best. A podium, though, was a realistic expectation.
Saudi Arabia: A Race That Did Not Yet Exist
It is worth clarifying a key detail in the historical record. Saudi Arabia did not actually join the Formula 1 calendar until 2021. The Jeddah Corniche Circuit was not part of the originally planned 2020 season, and any speculation framing the cancelled 2020 rounds as including a Saudi Arabian Grand Prix requires careful qualification. The confusion likely stems from the broader reshaping of the calendar that followed the pandemic, which saw new venues added and others displaced across multiple seasons.
What the 2020 cancellations did was shift the entire competitive narrative of the year. Without those early rounds, championship points were not distributed, psychological momentum was not established, and the slower teams lost races they might have used to develop correlation between their simulators and real-world performance.
When Formula 1 eventually returned in Austria in July 2020, the sport was operating inside a strict bubble environment. The revised 17-race calendar bore almost no resemblance to the original schedule, and circuits like Mugello, Portimao, and Istanbul were added as pandemic-friendly alternatives. The disruption was total.
Bahrain’s Second Life and What It Revealed
One of the more fascinating footnotes of the 2020 season was that Bahrain ultimately hosted not one but two Grands Prix in November, including the inaugural Sakhir Grand Prix run on the outer circuit layout. That double-header provided a belated look at how the 2020 cars performed at the venue, and it offered partial answers to the questions the cancelled March race had left open.
Mercedes remained dominant on the standard layout, though the Sakhir event brought a remarkable chapter of its own, with George Russell deputising for the COVID-stricken Hamilton and leading convincingly before a pit stop error and puncture denied him a fairytale win. The episode underlined just how much the disrupted season had created unpredictable human stories alongside its statistical anomalies.
Had Bahrain run in March as planned, Hamilton and Verstappen would almost certainly have been at the front. The midfield battle between Renault, McLaren, and a struggling Ferrari would have been intense and closely contested. Racing Point, whose RP20 drew significant controversy for its likeness to the 2019 Mercedes, might have turned heads early and forced the regulations conversation into the open even sooner.
Why the Lost Races Still Matter
Speculative analysis of cancelled races is more than an academic exercise. The 2020 season was one of the most statistically unusual in Formula 1 history, with Hamilton claiming his seventh world title on a compressed and irregular schedule. Without the cancelled rounds, certain drivers accumulated fewer points, certain teams lost track time they could not recover in the simulator, and the development race unfolded on a fundamentally altered timeline.
The pandemic-era disruption also accelerated structural changes within the sport. The budget cap, already agreed upon before 2020, took on renewed urgency as teams faced financial strain. Smaller outfits that might have used the cancelled early rounds to gather performance data were left even further behind when the season finally began.
Formula 1 emerged from 2020 changed in ways that are still being felt. The calendars that followed grew longer, new venues arrived, and the sport’s global footprint continued to expand. But the ghost of those lost early rounds in 2020 serves as a reminder of how fragile even the most logistically formidable sporting series can be when the world beyond the paddock intervenes.
Looking Ahead Through the Rearview Mirror
The cancelled 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix remains one of motorsport’s great what-ifs. A circuit that rewards the best cars and the boldest drivers, a new set of regulations still finding their shape, and a championship contender in Lewis Hamilton that would eventually prove near-unstoppable. Whether a March race in Sakhir would have changed the ultimate outcome of the season is impossible to say. What is certain is that the COVID-19 pandemic robbed fans, teams, and the sport itself of a beginning that was never recovered. Formula 1 adapted, survived, and ultimately thrived. But every now and then, it is worth pausing to consider the races that never happened.