The rain came down in sheets that August afternoon in 2021, turning the Ardennes forest into a grey smear and the most beloved circuit in Formula One into an undriveable torrent. After two postponements and three laps behind the safety car — no racing, no overtaking, just a procession through the mist — race control threw up its hands. Max Verstappen was declared the winner of the shortest Grand Prix in history . He had not, in any meaningful sense, raced. Neither had anyone else. Half-points were awarded. The fans, who had waited hours in the deluge, booed .
It was an absurdity, a black joke, the sort of thing that happens when commercial obligations collide with meteorological reality. But it was also quintessentially Spa-Francorchamps: dramatic, unforgiving, and faintly cursed. The Belgian Grand Prix has been killed off, resurrected, rotated in and out of the calendar, and haunted by tragedy more than any other race on the schedule. That it survives at all is testament not to its safety or its reliability, but to something more intangible — the stubborn romance of a circuit that refuses to be tamed.
A Contract Written in Disappearing Ink
The latest lifeline came in the form of a new deal announced by Formula One Management, but it is a lifeline with conditions. The Belgian Grand Prix will be held in 2026, 2027, 2029, and 2031 under the new contract — a rotational arrangement that amounts to racing every other year, with gaps that feel like small deaths. Before that, the circuit had secured extensions piecemeal: one announcement promised a place on the calendar until 2025 , a multi-year extension that sounded reassuring until you remembered how many times Spa had been dropped before.
The Belgian Grand Prix has a history of vanishing. It was eliminated from the 2003 calendar in a dispute over cigarette advertising — the circuit unwilling or unable to meet new tobacco sponsorship bans that were reshaping the sport's economics. The 2006 race was cancelled too, this time for track improvement works, according to the FIA . In 1971, the race was suspended altogether . Each absence felt temporary, but also ominous, as if the circuit were being slowly phased out by a sport that no longer quite needed it.
And yet it keeps coming back. Spa-Francorchamps is 7.004 kilometres of elevation change, high-speed corners, and microclimates that can see one part of the circuit drenched while another bakes in sunshine. It is the longest lap on the modern calendar, and the most demanding. Drivers love it in the way soldiers speak fondly of brutal campaigns: it tests you, it humbles you, and you are better for having survived it. The problem is that not everyone does.
The Corner That Kills
When people speak of Eau Rouge, they are almost always talking about Raidillon. Eau Rouge is the left-hander at the bottom of the hill; Raidillon is the steep right-hander that follows, a blind crest taken flat-out in top gear, where the car goes light and the world disappears. The distinction matters to purists , but the confusion is telling. The two corners have blurred into a single entity in the collective memory of the sport, a mythic test of courage that has claimed lives across decades and categories.
In 2019, Anthoine Hubert, a 22-year-old French Formula 2 driver, died after a crash at Spa-Francorchamps on 31st August . The accident happened at Raidillon. Hubert's car was struck at high speed after he had already gone off; the impact was catastrophic. He was the first driver to die at the circuit since the 1990s, a reminder that the old dangers had not been engineered away, only hidden by years of good fortune.
The circuit's dark history stretches back further. Alan Stacey, a 26-year-old English driver, died during the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix after being struck by a bird at 190 km/h . The bird hit him in the face; he lost control and crashed. It is the sort of freak accident that belongs to a different era of the sport, when drivers wore open-face helmets and death was a frequent guest. But Spa-Francorchamps has never entirely left that era behind. Fernando Alonso, one of the sport's most experienced and successful drivers, suffered six separate accidents on F1 race tracks — a statistic that underscores how even the best are vulnerable.
"Spa is a place where you cannot make mistakes. The circuit does not forgive."
After Hubert's death, there were calls for changes to Raidillon, for more run-off, for barriers that would prevent cars from rebounding into traffic. Some changes were made. But the corner remains essentially what it has always been: a high-speed compression that asks drivers to trust the car, the tyres, and their own nerve. It is why they love it. It is also why it keeps trying to kill them.
The Race That Wasn't
The 2021 Belgian Grand Prix was farcical, but it was also revealing. The race was supposed to start at 3pm; it was delayed until 6:17pm, when the field finally rolled out behind the safety car . Three laps later, with visibility near zero and several drivers reporting that they could not see the car ahead, race control called it off. Red Bull's Max Verstappen, who had qualified on pole, was declared the winner . George Russell, who had qualified second in a Williams, was given half-points for second place. It was the first time many of them had been on a podium. None of them had raced.
The decision to run even those three laps was widely seen as cynical. Broadcasting contracts and ticket sales create pressure to hold *some* semblance of a race, even if the conditions make actual racing impossible. The regulations required a minimum number of laps for points to be awarded; those laps were duly completed, though no one overtook, no one fought, and no one was in any real danger except from aquaplaning into a barrier. Verstappen later admitted it had been pointless .
The debacle prompted the F1 Commission to approve changes to the Sporting Regulations regarding points for shortened races , an acknowledgment that the rules had been gamed, and that the integrity of the sport required clearer thresholds. But the larger question went unaddressed: what do you do with a circuit where the weather can render racing impossible, where the romance of the location is inseparable from its unpredictability?
The Winners and the Footnotes
Spa-Francorchamps has produced some of the sport's most memorable victories. Lewis Hamilton won there easily on multiple occasions , his dominance such that the result felt inevitable before the lights went out. Charles Leclerc took victory at the Belgian Grand Prix in another year , a win that felt like a breakthrough for Ferrari's young driver. Max Verstappen, despite the absurdity of 2021, has been a regular winner at Spa, including a sixth victory of a season and another triumph that underscored Red Bull's dominance .
But Spa also produces footnotes. In 2012, Romain Grosjean was handed a one-race ban by the stewards for the Belgian Grand Prix after causing a first-lap pile-up at a previous race . He missed Spa — a punishment that felt apt for a circuit that does not forgive errors. Max Verstappen's 2021 "victory" will forever be asterisked, a race he did not finish in any meaningful sense , but one that went into the record books nonetheless.
There is a strange tension in the way Formula One treats Spa-Francorchamps. The sport venerates the circuit in public — drivers and team principals speak of it in hushed tones, call it the cathedral of racing, the ultimate test. But in private, the calculations are colder. Spa does not pay the hosting fees that newer circuits offer. Its infrastructure is ageing. The weather is unreliable. The calendar is crowded with venues in the Middle East and Asia that offer guaranteed sunshine and guaranteed money. Spa survives not because it is essential to the business model of modern Formula One, but because dropping it entirely would feel like an admission that the sport has lost something it cannot afford to lose.
The Rotation and What It Means
The new contract — 2026, 2027, 2029, 2031 — is a compromise. Spa-Francorchamps will share a rotational slot, most likely with another European race, in a calendar that has swollen to more than 20 rounds. The logic is ruthless: if a circuit cannot host every year, and cannot pay what others pay, then it races every other year. The alternative is not racing at all.
Rotation is presented as a solution, but it feels more like managed decline. A circuit that races every other year loses continuity, loses the rhythms that make it a fixture in the sport's calendar. Teams do not build their seasons around an event that might not happen next year. Sponsors lose interest. The local economy, which depends on the influx of fans and teams, is disrupted. And for the drivers, the knowledge that Spa might not be there next year lends a kind of elegiac quality to each race, a sense that they are driving through a museum.
The irony is that Spa-Francorchamps remains one of the most popular circuits among fans. The 2021 debacle notwithstanding, attendance is strong. The paddock is full. Social media lights up when the calendar includes Belgium. But popularity, in the current economics of Formula One, is not enough. What matters is whether the circuit can compete financially with the new venues, and the answer is no.
Tobacco, Money, and the Shape of the Calendar
The 2003 cancellation over tobacco advertising was an early warning. The Belgian Grand Prix had been funded in part by cigarette sponsorship, as had much of Formula One. When the European Union moved to ban tobacco advertising in sport, circuits and teams had to find new revenue. Some managed. Spa-Francorchamps struggled. The race was dropped, then brought back, then dropped again, each return feeling less secure than the last.
The pattern has repeated with different justifications. Track improvements in 2006 . Weather in 2021. Always there is a reason, and always the reason points to the same underlying issue: Spa-Francorchamps is expensive to maintain, difficult to monetise, and increasingly out of step with a sport that has globalised. The Belgian government provides some funding, but not enough to compete with the national prestige projects that have brought Formula One to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Las Vegas.
The sport insists it values heritage, but heritage does not pay the bills. The calendar is a zero-sum game: every new race in a Gulf state or an American city is one fewer slot for Silverstone, Monza, or Spa. The rotational model is an attempt to have it both ways, to preserve the historic circuits without sacrificing the lucrative new ones. But it is a fiction. A circuit that races every other year is already halfway to being history.
The Weather and the Gamble
The 2021 rain was not an anomaly. Spa-Francorchamps sits in the Ardennes, a region known for sudden weather changes and microclimates. A race can start in sunshine and end in a downpour. Drivers have described going through Eau Rouge in the dry and arriving at Les Combes in a monsoon. This unpredictability is part of the circuit's identity, part of what makes it compelling television and a genuine sporting test. It is also a logistical nightmare.
Modern Formula One is a television product before it is a sporting event. Broadcasting schedules are fixed months in advance. Advertisers pay for guaranteed eyeballs. Rain delays, cancellations, and three-lap farces are bad for business. The 2021 race became a meme, a punchline, a reminder that even the best-laid plans can be undone by weather. The shortened-race regulations were changed , but the weather was not. Spa will flood again. The question is whether Formula One will still be there when it does.
What Remains
The Belgian Grand Prix will return in 2026 . The stands will fill. The drivers will take the plunge through Eau Rouge — or Raidillon, properly speaking — and the broadcasters will linger on the shots of the forest and the undulating track. For a weekend, it will feel as though nothing has changed, as though Spa-Francorchamps is still the jewel of the calendar, untouchable and eternal.
But 2028 will be blank. So will 2030. The gaps in the calendar are where the future is written. Formula One has made a calculation: Spa-Francorchamps is worth keeping, but not worth keeping around. It is a circuit to be rotated, managed, preserved in amber as a kind of heritage site while the real business of the sport moves elsewhere.
The tragedy is not that Spa might disappear — though it might. The tragedy is that its survival has been reduced to a series of short-term deals and rotational compromises, each extension feeling less like a reprieve and more like a stay of execution. The circuit that once defined Formula One now exists at the sport's sufferance, tolerated for its history, its drama, and the lingering sense that a calendar without Belgium would be diminished in some way that cannot be quantified in hosting fees or television revenue.
Max Verstappen's shortest race in history may yet prove prophetic. Not because future races at Spa will be rained out — though they might — but because the circuit's time in Formula One is running short, measured now not in decades but in contracted years, in races scheduled and then skipped, in a slow fade that everyone can see coming but no one quite knows how to stop. The forest will still be there when Formula One leaves. The corner will still climb towards Raidillon. But the circus will have moved on, chasing the next lucrative deal, the next guaranteed payday, leaving behind only the memory of what racing used to be when weather mattered and circuits were not yet replaceable.