Global Time Zones, Petrodollars, and Existential Dread: The World Tunes In for the Saudi Grand Prix

The Gregorian calendar, that cheerful fiction we all agreed to pretend is real, insists the Formula 1 circus is in town once again—this time in Jeddah, a city whose coastal corniche looks suspiciously like Monaco after a particularly aggressive sand-blasting. Somewhere between the call to prayer and the call to Netflix, millions of humans will ask their phones the same question: “What time is the F1 race today?” The answer, like most things in our post-truth era, depends on which slice of the planet you happen to be standing on.

In London it’s 17:00 GMT, which is convenient because the pubs are open and the national sport of complaining about the weather can be momentarily postponed. In São Paulo it’s 14:00, right after lunch when the coffee has metabolized into existential dread about inflation. Tokyo catches it at 02:00 Monday, because nothing says “healthy work-life balance” like setting an alarm for a sport whose carbon footprint could power a medium-sized city. Meanwhile, Los Angeles gets it at 09:00—perfect timing for influencers to film themselves drinking oat-milk lattes while pretending to understand tire strategy.

The race itself is a masterclass in geopolitical theater. Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable company and occasional human-rights punchline, is the title sponsor. This means every lap is essentially a 200-mph PowerPoint presentation on the diversification of oil revenue. The drivers, bless their flame-retardant hearts, will politely ignore the backdrop of cranes building a “smart city” nobody asked for, while journalists type furiously about “sportswashing”—a term that sounds like a spin cycle but is really just the newest detergent for reputational stains.

Back in Europe, energy ministers are holding emergency meetings about Russian gas, but the continent’s most pressing concern is whether Charles Leclerc’s engine will detonate before his inevitable radio meltdown. In Delhi, a startup founder is live-tweeting the race between battery-swapping stations, hoping to prove that electric mobility is the future—except, of course, for the part where F1 still burns fuel like a small war. And in Lagos, a viewing party is charging 5,000 naira per head, which is either a bargain or extortion depending on the current black-market dollar rate.

The broadcast feed, a marvel of 21st-century compression algorithms, will bounce off satellites owned by nations that can’t agree on basic human rights but somehow synchronize perfectly to deliver 4K slow-motion replays of carbon-fiber shrapnel. Viewers in Kyiv will watch despite rolling blackouts, because even Russian missile strikes take second billing to Max Verstappen’s latest act of vehicular manslaughter. Australians, still hungover from their own Grand Prix, will grumble about the time zone while secretly grateful for any distraction from the fact their coral reef is dying faster than Daniel Ricciardo’s career.

And then there’s the meta-commentary: the Netflix documentary crew capturing the “raw emotion” of drivers who’ve been media-trained since kindergarten, the crypto sponsors who’ve already gone bankrupt but whose logos remain like digital tattoos, the NFTs of podium moments nobody wanted in the first place. Somewhere, a bot farm in Southeast Asia is churning out hot takes about the hot takes, proving that even the outrage economy is now automated.

When the checkered flag falls—roughly 90 minutes after your local start time, unless a rogue missile or rogue Aston Martin intervenes—we’ll all go back to pretending we care about less trivial matters. The Saudis will tally tourism receipts, Netflix will tally views, and the planet will tally another 150 tons of CO₂ nobody asked for. But for those two hours, the world’s time zones align in perfect, fleeting harmony, united by the universal human desire to watch millionaires drive in circles while complaining about tire degradation.

So set your alarms, or don’t. The race starts when the algorithm says it does, and ends when the last influencer posts their final story. Everything else is just background noise—albeit background noise with a very expensive soundtrack.