African Grand Prix In Rwanda: Everything We Know As F1 Returns To Africa After More Than Three Decades

While you were looking up news about when India could return to the F1 calendar, Formula 1 announced it will return to Africa for the first time since 1993. The sport has signed a 10-year deal with Rwanda to stage the African Grand Prix presented by Visit Rwanda. The new track is expected to join the F1 calendar in the early 2030s on a new circuit in Bugesera, close to the country’s capital, Kigali. 

If the race arrives as soon as 2030, it will have been 37 years since Kyalami in South Africa hosted the last Grand Prix on the continent. 

The news was announced on Tuesday at an event in Kigali attended by Rwandan president Paul Kagame, F1 president and CEO Stefano Domenicali and FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem. Here’s everything we know about the African Grand Prix as of now.

A new track is being built in Bugesera, about 40km (25 miles) south of Kigali and next to the city's new international airport. Alexander Wurz, the former F1 driver, has designed the circuit through his firm WurzDesign. The construction is being overseen by Tilke, the engineering group behind a number of existing F1 tracks, along with DAR. F1 says the layout is designed to work with the natural landscape, using the area's elevation changes to give drivers a demanding lap and fans good places to watch from.

The Rwanda Development Board is leading the project. It intends to make a new racing complex of homes and hotels around the track itself to make it a year-round racing destination. Jean-Guy Afrika, the board's CEO, has said in December 2025 that Rwanda wanted to use its new international airport as a chance to develop an entire new city, with the F1 track as one piece of it. 

No year has been set for the first race. Reports suggest F1 will want to avoid Rwanda's main rainy season from March to May, with a shorter wet period in October and November also in the mix, and the sport has said it will keep the season to a maximum of 24 races. A new date on a capped calendar tends to raise an awkward question about which existing venue gives up its chair.

Talks between F1 and Rwanda over a race accelerated in 2024. This was the year when Kigali hosted the FIA's annual Prize Giving Ceremony, with Max Verstappen travelling to the country to collect his fourth F1 world title trophy. In 2025, the city staged the UCI Road World Championships in cycling, the first edition held in Africa.

Lewis Hamilton, the seven-time world champion, has regularly called on F1's leadership to put a race in Africa. In 2024, he retorters how F1 “can’t be adding races in other locations and continue to ignore Africa, which the rest of the world takes from.”

South Africa has also pushed for a return, with talks with F1 in recent years about Kyalami and Cape Town, but no deal has come together.