Australian GP open to sharing 'season-opener' tag

The Australian Grand Prix has regularly been the opening race of the F1 season in the modern era but organisers say they’re happy to share that with other circuits in the future.

Melbourne has hosted the race Down Under since 1996 and the streak of races at the Albert Park circuit was only broken by the covid pandemic, with the Grands Prix in 2020 and 2021 cancelled.

The sport made a welcome return to the country in 2022, however, and recently extended its deal with Formula 1 to 2035, meaning that there are plenty of years to come of Grand Prix racing in the country.

Typically since its introduction to F1, the sport has hosted the opening race of the year, with only three exceptions to that since the mid-90s, including this year as Bahrain and then Saudi Arabia kicked us off.

Aussie GP CEO Andrew Westacott said, though, that they’d be open to such situations again, providing they can try and host one of the earlier Grands Prix every year:

“This was only the third year [of not hosting the first Grand Prix] and this was because of the timing of Ramadan, and the importance of those,” he said to the Australian Grand Prix podcast.

“We don’t want to be staging our [race] over the Easter break in the same way that Islamic countries need to work around the timing of their religious festival in Ramadan.

“We’d always coveted the first race, because I think there is something special about the opening race, opening the season, the new liveries, teams. There’s a level of freshness.

“But in a city like Melbourne, you don’t have the ability to generate all the hype and media excitement in the same manner as when there were two races [before Australia.]

“There was already a storyline about Ferrari, the competitiveness of the new cars,