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Originally posted by Georgeair:
Did I miss where we stopped calling this the German Grand Prix? Saw Eifel and thought WTF - are we going to a spelling-challenged road circuit in Paris??

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My theory is that it's a combination of the modern F1 business model and COVID.

The San Marino GP was kind of an oddball, because the race was in Italy but was sanctioned by the San Marino national automobile association. That was done because the FIA has a rule where each country can only have one grand prix. So the Imola race used this loophole to get around that restriction.

I always thought that the real reason why Imola never returned to the calendar after 1994 was not because of the deaths to Senna and Ratzenberger, but because by then, the F1 business model of extracting huge fees from the race promoters couldn't work with Imola because there is no way the nation of San Marino can pay that money.

But with COVID, my other theory is that the desperation to create a race calendar allowed the FIA to maybe put aside the requirement that each grand prix must be sanctioned by a national automobile federation for 2020. That's why we got grands prix for Styria, Tuscany, Sakhir this year. Obviously, they could have named the Eifel GP and the Emilia Rogmana GP as the German GP and San Marino GP, but I think Liberty would have been weary of setting a precedence by given those national automobile federations a "free" grand prix because they didn't pay the rights fee to Liberty to get a proper race. Instead, we got weird grands prix named after regions this year.

If we got a race at Watkins Glen this year, they probably would have called it the Finger Lakes Grand Prix.

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Originally posted by Georgeair:
Did I miss where we stopped calling this the German Grand Prix? Saw Eifel and thought WTF - are we going to a spelling-challenged road circuit in Paris??

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Originally posted by Kuisis:
Poor Lance.