If anyone's interested, I've also put the locations of the nine teams and eight races (plus Hungaroring) on the map too - circuits in red, teams in green. Silverstone's a bit hard to see, because of Mercedes, Force India and Red Bull all being clustered near it (Force India is actually the opposite junction on the roundabout to Silverstone's main entrance...)
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It’s a fair point about most of the teams being in Europe, so having lots of races there makes sense logistically. However, just to play devil’s advocate to that position.
One, as we move forward, logistics will become less and less of an issue. Well, maybe not less of an issue, but more will be possible. Go back to 1970, tell F1 teams that they’ll be doing 21 races in a season, on nearly every continent...they’d laugh, say you were crazy...itd be “logistically impossible”, yet here we are.
I don’t know how many more races could realistically be added to the calander, but I think at least a few could be added. And who knows where global transportation will be at in another 10-20 years.
And perhaps not the greatest example, but look at pro sports teams in the US and Canada. Let’s look at Hockey.
The Original Six teams, as they’re often referred to (Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York) are all located relatively close together. We could easily draw a circle enclosing those 6 cities, and say, “well, this is where the sport started, it’s where most of the teams are located, etc”, so, “we should have most of the teams and games take place within this circle”. Logistically, it would make a hell of a lot more sense of every North American pro sports team was located on the east coast.
But they’re not, American pro sports has expanded to nearly every corner of the continent. Again, go back to the 70s and tell an NHL person that in 2018, there would be more than 30 teams in the league, playing 80+ games a season, and Las Vegas and Nashville would meet in the Cup Finals....again, they’d laugh at you and label you crazy.
Like I mentioned before, when the NHL started expanding into markets like LA, Florida, Carolina, Nashville, Pheonixus, etc, there was a lot of die hard Canadians, especially in Quebec City and Winnipeg, who felt hockey had no business being in those markets, that the NHL would collapse because of it, that they games would be played in front of zero fans, etc.
Fast forward to today. Some of the expansion teams, like Phoenix and Atlanta, turned out to be flops. The fans never really got into it, but that’s most due to the teams constantly having a losing record, and poor promotional effort by the owners. Other expansion teams though, like Carolina and Nashville, turned out to be very successful. Both teams took a while to get going, fans took a while to take to the sport....but now, both Carolina and Nashville are known for having some of the best and loudest crowds in the league, with the tail gating before Hurricane games being something of a modern legend in the NHL.
So, if we compare F1 to NHL, for arguments sake, let’s say F1 is several orders of magnitude “bigger” than the NHL, in scope and scale. So perhaps, just like it took time for the NHL to really sink into places like LA, Nashville, and North Carolina, it will take a while for F1 to sink into its expansion markets. And because F1 is that much bigger than hockey, perhaps it will take time proportionate to the “order of magnitude” in difference of scope and scale of F1 vs the NHL for it to really gain a foothold in new markets.
