Portugal returns to the Formula 1 calendar: an old circuit, a blank data field, and a test for the people who draw the diagrams

A blank cell in the spreadsheet

On Tuesday night I reopened an old file on my hard drive: POR_Estoril. It is the only thing left from the days when I still drew diagrams in PowerPoint and posted them on a blog almost nobody read. Twelve rows. One row per season. One row per Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril. The last column said "lap record", and I left it empty for seven years, because I could not be certain the number I had written down was right.

The next morning the news arrived that the Portuguese Grand Prix is returning to the Formula 1 calendar. I did not write immediately. I opened Excel, created a new sheet, typed the circuit name into cell A1, and stared at the empty cell B1 for about thirty seconds.

At twenty-eight, living in London and working as someone who reads circuit data to tell British audiences what is about to happen, I have learned something fairly uncomfortable: the hardest part of this job is not explaining a race that has already happened. The hardest part is saying honestly that there are races about which I know nothing at all, and saying it in a newspaper that needs an article with numbers in it.

So this piece goes the opposite way from my own habit. Instead of pouring out everything I know about Portugal, I will write about the blank space that a returning round leaves in every strategist's spreadsheet. Every tactical diagram starts with a shaky hand-drawn line on PowerPoint. But before there can be a line, there has to be an empty cell that can withstand silence.

Context: a decision about the calendar, not about the circuit

The return of the Portuguese Grand Prix is a calendar decision, and that is the first thing that needs separating out. A round being added to or dropped from the Formula 1 calendar is the product of a chain of negotiation between the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the commercial rights holder Formula One Management (FOM) and the host. There is a contract. There is a hosting fee. There is a slot in the schedule that someone must give up, or a gap that someone must fill.

In the source material I have, the only hard fact is this: the Portuguese Grand Prix is back on the calendar. Everything else is memoir. The veteran writer of that piece describes the disappointment when the race disappeared, the joy when it returned, a snake crawling near the press room at Estoril, and a half-joking remark by Perry McCarthy — the former British driver who later became the first "Stig" on Top Gear — calling some part of the Formula 1 world "the reptiles". That is wonderful material for a veteran columnist. It is not material for a dataset.

The history of the race itself is clearer. The Portuguese Grand Prix appeared in the early years of the world championship, at Boavista and Monsanto, then returned seriously in 2026 at Estoril — a 4.36 km circuit with thirteen corners, on the coast west of Lisbon. Estoril held the race for twelve consecutive seasons, until 2026.

Those twelve seasons left behind a results list that anyone working with data has to cite carefully. In 2026 Ayrton Senna won at Estoril in heavy rain — the first victory of his Formula 1 career, and it did not come at an easy circuit. In 2026 Nigel Mansell was shown the black flag during the race for reversing in the pit lane, losing a result he controlled. In 2026 Jacques Villeneuve won the final race of the Estoril era in a Williams-Renault.

Then the race disappeared. Only in 2026 and 2026 did Formula 1 return to Portugal, and not to Estoril but to the Autódromo Internacional do Algarve, commonly called Portimão — a 4.653 km circuit with fifteen corners in the southern Algarve region.

And here the first blank space appears. In the source material, the circuit for this return is not named clearly. The writer uses Estoril as a memory, not as a location. For someone working with data this is a small but decisive detail: every inference about circuit character, about tyre strategy, about pit windows, begins with a single question — which piece of tarmac are we talking about?

The geometry of a memory

Estoril is not a beautiful circuit in purely geometric terms. It is 4.36 km long, shorter than the average modern circuit, and that is why teams tend to treat it as a tyre-load problem rather than a pure speed problem.

The circuit has one feature I always separate out when building a model: the long right-hander at the end of the lap that leads onto the start-finish straight. It is a corner designed to extend the load on the front-left tyre, and the consequence is that tyre strategy at Estoril always has more rhythm than explosion in it. You cannot go fast if you cannot manage front-left tyre temperature across the last three quarters of a race.

There is another variable that makes Estoril's data hard to use: the refuelling rule. From 2026 to 2026 the Portuguese Grand Prix took place in an era when mid-race refuelling was permitted, meaning a pit stop was not only about tyres. From 2026 onward refuelling was banned, and the final Estoril seasons are the ones that are genuinely clean to read by modern logic. Anyone who takes pit data from 2026–2026 and compares it with today is comparing two different sports.

When I talk about the geometry of space, this is exactly what I mean: a circuit is not just a set of corners. It is a system of decisions. Where you place the braking point determines tyre load. Tyre load determines the pit window. The pit window determines how a team splits a race into three or four segments. And the way you split the race determines who is where when a rival's tyres fall out of their working range.

Estoril has another important characteristic: overtaking difficulty. A short circuit with a single long straight compresses overtaking into a very narrow window. In the late 1980s and early 1990s that meant a car with better pace but stuck in second place might take twenty laps to find a way past. This is the kind of detail television can never fully convey, but engineers remember it clearly, because it shapes the entire strategic problem before the race even starts.

A circuit with no sample: how strategists prepare

This is the part I actually want to talk about, because it relates directly to my work.

When a new or returning round is added to the calendar, teams do not face a shortage of information. They face an excess of information and a shortage of verified data. Those are two entirely different problems.

Technically, every team will run that circuit in the simulator beforehand. The track map is rebuilt from surface-scan data, satellite imagery, any source that can be measured. Drivers then run thousands of laps in the simulator while engineers record everything: corner entry speed, braking points, acceleration time, simulated tyre temperature.

The problem is that a simulator is only as good as its inputs. For a circuit no team has run with a modern Formula 1 car at, the correlation between simulation and reality will be lower than usual. That is not a fault. It simply means conclusions drawn from simulation should be treated as hypotheses, not as facts.

Based on my experience following races and logging every occasion on which teams confronted a low-sample circuit, I see a repeating pattern. Friday practice becomes more exploratory than usual. Teams run setup configurations designed to gather information rather than to find the fastest lap. They test two aerodynamic load levels, sometimes three. And they hide their true run counts in their reports, because nobody wants rivals to know what they are looking for.

There is one variant of this problem I watch particularly closely. If the returning circuit is Portimão, teams still have a considerable body of data from the 2026 and 2026 seasons, plus years of data from motorcycle racing that has run there. The surface has changed, but the shape has not. If the returning circuit is Estoril, the archive is effectively empty: no modern Formula 1 car has run there, and every model must be built from scratch.

Those two scenarios produce entirely different levels of uncertainty. And I refuse to merge them into a single story, because that is the fastest route to writing an analysis that is wrong while sounding very persuasive.

Logistics and the cost cap: the real value of a European round

There is one aspect that commentary on a returning round usually skips: operating cost.

An intercontinental round consumes an enormous amount of money for air and sea freight, for travelling personnel, for the recovery time of the technical crew. A European round does not. Trucks drive straight there. Staff take short flights. The turnaround between two events is shorter, which means the workforce gets a few more nights of sleep.

In the cost-cap era this kind of difference is not trivial. Every round added to the calendar carries a marginal cost, and a European round carries a distinctly lower one. For midfield teams who must balance every pound between car development and operations, this is a real benefit, even if it is a quiet one.

I checked this myself in the only way available to me: by comparing the cost structure of European rounds with that of long-haul rounds across 2026–2026, when the calendar was disrupted and European events were prioritised. Public data is not detailed enough to isolate each line item, so I state clearly in my data limitations section that my conclusion about the cost advantage is a reasoned inference, not an audited figure.

The summer of 2026 taught me that a gap is never empty; it is merely waiting for someone to read it correctly. When the world closed down, Formula 1 had to race on a single continent, and European rounds suddenly became the backbone of a season. The Portuguese round at Portimão that year existed for operational reasons, not emotional ones. I remember that every time I read a piece claiming a race returned because the fans loved it.

Transition: where blank space is filled with assumption

Transition is not a stretch of running. It is the silence between two intentions that few people can read.

At a circuit with no data, every transition becomes an open question. When a safety car appears, which team is in the right position to exploit it? Who pits, who stays out? If the circuit has a high safety car rate — and newly added or returning circuits often do in their first outing, because barriers and escape roads are not yet familiar to drivers — then the optimal strategy tilts sharply towards whoever accepts risk.

The notable thing is that teams cannot measure that probability with their own data. They must borrow data from other series that have run at the same circuit, or from circuits with similar characteristics. That borrowing process always carries error, and the error is never published.

In my own spreadsheet, I tag circuits with three levels: full sample, partial sample, blank sample. A circuit returning after nearly three decades sits in the third level. When a circuit is at that level, I write a single note in the comment column: "Do not pretend to know."

This is where most sports analysis goes wrong. Writers tend to fill blank space with confident assertions, because confidence sells better than doubt. But a piece claiming a new circuit will produce many overtakes, a two-stop strategy and a spectacular performance is a piece with no foundation at all, only noise.

Paddock culture as an unmeasurable variable

Two very small details in the source material I want to keep: the snake crawling near the press room at Estoril, and the remark about "the reptiles".

For someone working with data, the first reflex is to discard them. They cannot be measured. They do not fit in a spreadsheet. They do not help predict a race result.

But they are part of how a race exists. Perry McCarthy was a driver with a short and brutal career who later wrote about himself with a self-deprecating voice rare in this paddock. When he called some part of Formula 1 "the reptiles", he was speaking the language of a man who had been inside the game and knew where he stood in it. That is not verifiable information, and I will not infer anything about any specific person from it.

But it reminds me that a race is not only tarmac. It is a temporary community, built and dismantled within days, with unwritten rules nobody writes down. The snake near the press room is a detail of operational nuisance at a coastal circuit where the technical area sits near vegetation. It was harmless. But it reminds us that every circuit contains variables that no model holds, and an honest writer has to acknowledge them.

I do this job for the numbers. But I stay in this job for the details that never become numbers.

The blind spot: when nostalgia is sold as a gift

The story told about the return of the Portuguese Grand Prix is a story of memory rewarded. An old race disappears, fans grieve, and years later it comes back like a gift. That version is pleasant. It is also very easy to sell.

But a race does not come back because it deserves to. It comes back because someone pays. There is a hosting fee, usually paid from public funds or through a government sponsorship contract, and that money must be justified to taxpayers. There is a negotiation over contract length. There is a slot in the calendar that another race must lose, or a gap the organiser must fill by stretching the season to a length the technical workforce has to endure.

When commentary speaks only of memory, it conceals the operational half of the story. And this applies beyond circuits. It applies to the stories I still read about sport: the small team beating the giant through spirit, the small town defeating the empire through identity. Those stories are not entirely false, but they usually omit the financial gap and the conditions for sustainable operation — the things that determine whether the story survives into the next season.

A returning round can be good news. But it is conditional good news, and the condition lives in the contract, not in the memory.

What to watch

Three things will decide whether this return means anything or is just a line in a press release.

First, the name of the circuit. Until that is confirmed officially, every technical analysis is an imagination exercise decorated with numbers.

Second, the contract length. A round held once is an event. A round with a multi-year contract is an operational commitment, and it will change how teams invest in that circuit's data.

Third, the calendar slot. If the new round takes the place of another, we are talking about redistribution, not expansion. Those two are entirely different in meaning for teams.

Cell B1 in my spreadsheet is still empty. I will leave it empty until there is real data, because an honest empty cell is still worth more than a cell filled with guesswork. And if the returning circuit turns out to be Estoril — where Senna first won in the rain, where Mansell was black-flagged, where a snake once crawled past the press room — then I will have to rebuild the entire model from scratch, with exactly twelve old rows of data and not a single lap from the modern era.

The question I set myself for next season is not who will win in Portugal. It is this: will any of us be brave enough to say we do not know, right up until the first car rolls out of the pit lane?