Formula 1 visits 24 locations annually, across 21 countries, and its equipment needs to be present. It is a gargantuan operation.
“I’ve been here 39 years, we used to do 16 races, five international, now it’s 15 international and nine Europeans,” Paul Fowler, vice president of motorsport product for DHL Motorsport, Formula 1’s longtime logistics partner, said in an interview. “It was two DC-10s in the day, the 747 freighter just about existed — now it’s up to nine flights per race — and the calendar was spread. Now you’re doing checkered flag down on a Sunday, Monday we’re at the next race.”
Equipment is split among air, sea and road freight. For European events most equipment travels by road, and for the remainder — colloquially called flyaways — essential items are flown on up to nine 777 jets, including the cars. Nonessential equipment is shipped by sea. There are extreme examples, like knives and forks.
“Cutlery is sponsor-specific for teams, so you can’t just take whatever, and you can’t locally source it,” Fowler said.
The grueling schedule means every movement is carefully coordinated.
“The first plane takes 30 pallets, so each team gets three pallets as their priority freight,” said Simon Price, event manager for DHL Motorsport. “That will normally go just over 12 hours after the flag, but it depends where we’re going.
“After Las Vegas, the next race is the next week in Qatar. We’re changing continents and time zones, we have an 18-hour flight, but there’s also a deficit of 11 hours [time zone change], so we lose over 24 hours, just a liftoff, and that’s before we set up — and everything still has to be done. The schedules are so tight, this industry and what we’re working in now, everything is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible — and that also extends to logistics.”
The logistics team must monitor costs and consider restrictions on Russia’s airspace. Avoiding the Suez Canal because of military action there has lengthened journeys. And the team must be prepared if seaports are congested. Smooth relationships and experience with customs personnel are also essential, especially in countries where signoffs take longer.
“We do have a Plan A, B and C, and we do joke that we never want to get to P, Q and R, which is Panic, Quit and Run!” Fowler said.
Such contingencies mean Formula 1 has rarely has had any problems, even with issues in recent years, including a storm in the Gulf of Mexico, two planes having technical problems between Grands Prix in Australia and China, and the collapse of part of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore affecting shipping lanes.
“Teams will never be without anything,” Price said. “Our deadlines are not like commercial deadlines where if you can’t deliver it on Friday you could deliver it on Monday morning — that doesn’t work here because the race is on Sunday. It has to be here.”
Price recalled an engine manufacturer requiring the urgent deployment of a repaired component to the track during a race weekend.
“This was on Friday afternoon; we were in Italy,” Price said. “We booked a flight for one of our guys, he flew to the U.K., had a van to take him to the factory. There were no flights available to return, so we had to get a private jet, but the only one we could get was in Nice,” in France.
They flew the jet to Luton Airport, near London, but “Luton takeoff rights wouldn’t allow the plane to take off overnight, so we had to move the plane to Birmingham.” He said they then flew to the Malpensa airport near Milan, with a man carrying the part in a suitcase.
“We had a car waiting for him there and took him straight to the circuit,” Price said. “That’s Friday 4 p.m. to Saturday lunchtime.”
The Imola track in Italy this weekend hosts the first European round, the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, so road transport takes over. But there are events across the next two weekends, in Monaco and Spain, bringing further complications. Three Grands Prix in successive weekends used to be rare, but they are now commonplace.
“In the old days we could never do back-to-backs, as everything was built around single events,” Ian Stone, Formula 1’s director of transport logistics and cargo, said in an interview. “Now we have two sets of key infrastructure: the E.T.C. [Event Technology Center], cabling, fiber optic network, the pit lane garage network, and we leapfrog with an A and B team.
“For Imola, one team went out last Thursday [May 8], starting the setup. They’ll stay until after the race, while the other team will be in Monaco, then the Imola team will go straight to Spain. There’s some expensive kit that you don’t have multiple versions of, so we have priority trucks that will be on the road by midnight to get there Monday lunchtime. Our deadline is to be ready to do a full system test with the F.I.A. at 2 p.m. on Thursday, and that’s an immovable object.”
Despite the quantity of equipment — which Formula 1 estimates is about 1,200 tons per race and likely to grow in 2026 with Cadillac’s arrival — and the expanded schedule, championship officials say they are managing to arrange logistics in line with their sustainability and Net Zero 2030 ambitions. Instead of the trucks burning gasoline or standard diesel fuel, they are using Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or S.A.F., and biofuels.
“When you look at the biofuels in our trucks, which power our European season, that’s over an 80 percent reduction in our carbon footprint compared to standard fuel,” said Ellen Jones, Formula 1’s head of environment, social and governance. S.A.F., Jones said, is a minimum 80 percent reduction compared with Jet-A fuel: “For sustainability, those are massive numbers.”
The nature of the sport means the wheels never stop turning.
“There’s a lot of work going on for 2026 because of new cars and regulations,” Stone said.
“There’s more testing at the start of the year, a test is still an event for us and the teams so we have to plan around those,” he continued, referring to the sport’s expanded preseason testing. “You have most of the arrangements for the first half of the year done by the end of the preceding year, now we’re starting to work in terms of planning for ’26.”
The post The Art of Moving F1 Around the World appeared first on New York Times.
