SA’s F1 bid steering committee receives three bids
The committee set up by Sports Minister Gayton McKenzie to bring back Formula One to South Africa has confirmed that three bids were received by the March 18 deadline.
The country is expected to submit its official bid to host a Grand Prix in May this year.
South Africa last held a race in 1993 at Kyalami in Johannesburg.
The committee says the evaluation process for the received bids will be concluded by the end of April.
“Thereafter, the committee will provide guidance to qualifying bidders on the process to unfold under Phase 2, wherein detailed proposals will be required. These proposals will have to comply with F1 requirements and meet our own national imperatives,” said the committee’s chairperson, Bakang Lethoko.
South Africa's bid to host F1 can count on the support of seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, who has long advocated for an African Grand Prix.
"We can't be adding races in other locations and continuing to ignore Africa," Hamilton said last August.
Under the leadership of US conglomerate Liberty Media, which bought the Formula One Group in 2017, the sport wants to "go to every continent", said expert Samuel Tickell of the University of Munster in Germany.
He told AFP that returning to South Africa would be "very important for Formula 1, which has not raced there since the end of the apartheid era. “
The sport had lived some "historic moments" in the country, Tickell said, including a threatened strike led by Niki Lauda in 1982 against a racing "super-licence" restricting drivers' contractual freedom.
South Africa also boasts the continent's only world champion, Ferrari's Jody Scheckter in 1979.
An alternative circuit vying to hold the prestigious race would snake through the streets of Cape Town, recently ranked "best city in the world" by Time Out magazine.
Winding its way around the stadium built for the 2010 men's football World Cup in the shadow of the emblematic Lion's Head mountain overlooking the ocean, the route has already hosted a Formula E race in 2023.
An F1 street circuit in the city would "outclass Monaco," said Cape Town Grand Prix CEO Igshaan Amlay.
Yet the real battle may be less between the two rival cities than against Rwanda, whose President Paul Kagame was at the Singapore Grand Prix in September to meet the sport's governing body, the FIA and F1 owners Liberty Media, Chadwick said.
* Additional reporting by AFP
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