Three decades after the Formula 1 engines (F1) have laughed for the last time on the African Tarmac, South Africa sets up an offer to organize a new Grand Prix and bring the world championship back to the continent.
The competition to host the Hautocytane show is between two slopes: a street circuit in Cape Town and the less picturesque but historic Kyalami race outside of Johannesburg.
A committee set up by the Minister of Sports Gayton McKenzie will choose the winning offer in the third quarter of the year, said Mlimandlela Ndamase, member of the Committee, told Agency France-Press (AFP).
Explained: has Africa already welcomed an F1 race? Can Kigali win the offer?
McKenzie is confident on the chances of South Africa.
“The Grand Prix arrives definitively in 2027, without a doubt,” he said in early February.
“Whether it’s CAP or Joburg, we don’t care as long as the Grand Prix arrives in South Africa.”
Kyalami’s difficult circuit – which zigzags at around 30 kilometers (20 miles) outside Johannesburg and where the track is painted with a huge colorful South African flag – once welcomed races and legendary drivers.
But the last Grand Prix on African soil took place in 1993, the year before the first democratic elections of South Africa which ended apartheid. It was won by Alain Prost in a Williams.
Post-Apartheid return?
The South African offer to welcome F1 can count on the support of the seven times world champion Lewis Hamilton, which has long pleaded for an African Grand Prix.
“We cannot add races in other places and continue to ignore Africa,” said Hamilton last August.
Under the direction of the American conglomerate Liberty Media, which bought the Formula 1 group in 2017, sport wants to “go to all continents,” said expert Samuel Tickell, from Munster University in Germany.
The return to South Africa would be “something very important for Formula 1, which has not run there since the end of the apartheid era,” he told AFP.
Sport had experienced “historical moments” in the country, said Tickell, including a threatened strike led by Niki Lauda in 1982 against a “super-reception” of racing restricting the contractual freedom of drivers.
South Africa also has the only world champion on the continent, Jody Scheckter from Ferrari in 1979.
Creating a race on the continent would not require excluding other sites because the F1 calendar is still expanding. The coming season has seven other Grand Prix than in 2009, for example.
The organizational costs and the accommodation costs of Sky-High would not be an obstacle either, said Simon Chadwick, a sports and geopolitical economy teacher at the SKEMA Business School in Paris.
“Even if the races are not commercially viable, for some countries and their donors, it will not matter because it is a strategic gain,” he said.
China, for example, “has long been built sports infrastructure for African countries in exchange for access to their natural resources,” he said.
Johannesburg’s Kyalami racing track is certified in 2nd year, just a level lower than that necessary for an F1 race and it will take a certain work to organize an event.
Rwanda “pole position”
An alternative circuit in the running to hold the prestigious race served in the streets of the CAP, recently classified “best city in the world” by Time Out magazine.
Wrapping its path in the stadium built for the 2010 male football world cup in the shadow of the iconic lion’s head mountain overlooking the ocean, the route has already organized a Formula E race in 2023.
Rwanda, Morocco also race F1 Eye
An F1 street circuit in the city “would outperform Monaco,” said CEO of the Cape Grand Prix, Igshaan Amlay.
However, the real battle can be less between the two rival cities than against Rwanda, whose President Paul Kagame was at the Singapore Grand Prix in September to meet IT director of sport, the International Automobile Federation (FIA) and the F1 Liberty Media owners, said Chadwick.
The Central African country already sponsors the giants of football Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and is a partner of the National Basketball Association (NBA).
“Rwanda is in pole position,” said Chadwick.
Morocco has long been ambitions to organize an F1 race.
However, nothing prevents two general practitioners who stand on the continent, the South African Minister of Sports asking: “Why is, as far as Africa is concerned, we are treated as if we can only obtain it?”
The Rwanda F1 offer could however be hampered by its involvement in the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The calls have already made to withdraw the world cycling championships, scheduled for Kigali in September.
