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In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare wrote, “that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Surely if you asked Max Verstappen if he’d prefer the race he won on Sunday (Nov. 5) be called the Brazilian Grand Prix as is tradition, or the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, as it has been since 2021, he’d offer something similarly eloquent.
Still, in a motorsport that lacks the more… unique race names of some of its rivals, upon close inspection, the apparently simple titling convention for Grands Prix reveals itself to be anything but.
On the eve of Formula 1’s first-ever Las Vegas Grand Prix (although not F1’s first ever grand prix in Las Vegas) Pit Straight co-hosts and international geography enthusiasts Jack Swansey and Alex Gintz take a deep dive into the complicated, confusing, and sometimes downright controversial reasons that F1 races are called what they are.
The Pit Straight is Frontstretch‘s F1 podcast, available weekly on Tuesdays on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and right here on the web.
Jack Swansey primarily covers open-wheel racing for Frontstretch and co-hosts The Pit Straight Podcast,but you can also catch him writing about NASCAR, sports cars, and anything else with four wheels and a motor. Originally from North Carolina and now residing in Los Angeles, he joined the site as Sunday news writer midway through 2022 and is an avid collector (some would say hoarder) of die-cast cars.