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Formula One on Tuesday unveiled a 23-race schedule for 2021, the largest in history, but the Vietnam Grand Prix has been scrapped. The season will begin in Australia on March 21 and will include the first race in Saudi Arabia on November 28 before the season ends a week later in Abu Dhabi. Vietnam was going to hold a street race on April 25, but doubts were raised about the event after Nguyen Duc Chung, who was the mayor of Hanoi and a leading supporter of the event, was arrested on corruption charges in August. In the calendar presented on Tuesday, the place of the race was vacant.
The 2020 F1 season was heavily disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, but will ultimately be contested over 17 races, with reigning champion Lewis Hamilton on track to win the title for the seventh time. Spectators have been excluded from most races this year, but organizers said they hope fans will return next year. “The plans for 2021 have involved extensive dialogue with all promoters and their local and national authorities at a time of ongoing fluidity related to the global pandemic,” F1 said in a statement.
“As we said before, we hope that fans will return for the 2021 season and that the schedule will look similar to the originally planned 2020 season.” Saudi Arabia said last week that it was holding a race for the first time, an announcement likely to spark further allegations from human rights groups that the kingdom is using high-profile sporting events to “launder” its human rights record. The Netherlands, home to popular Red Bull driver Max Verstappen, has a race a year earlier than originally planned with a berth on September 5 in the seaside town of Zandvoort.
It will be the first Dutch grand prix since 1985. Vietnam entered Formula One in the hope that the sport’s glamor would reflect the country’s economic take-off and reshape Hanoi’s serious image, as it has done with Singapore, which will once again. host a race next year. The communist nation signed a 10-year deal with Formula One in 2018 and state media said hosting the race would cost the country $ 60 million a year. The fee was charged in full by the country’s largest private conglomerate, VinGroup, which it hoped to dazzle with a night run.
But its 2020 race was canceled due to concerns that teams and fans coming from abroad could spark a new Covid-19 outbreak and the corruption scandal surrounding Nguyen Duc Chung now threatens the future of the event. “Without Chung, the future of the race is bleak. It may not happen,” a source close to the race who requested anonymity told AFP.
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