Monaco is still Formula 1's blue-riband event, the weekend of superyachts, A-list celebrities and billionaires that no other race can match. But behind the glamour, the principality has been forced to bend in order to keep the sport's crown jewel — and the changes run far deeper than the cosmetic.
For decades the Automobile Club de Monaco held the upper hand. It dictated the date, traditionally the last weekend in May. It sold the hospitality packages and the trackside signage, and crucially it produced the television feed that beamed the race to the world. As paddock photographer and long-time insider Kym Illman explained, that balance of power has now decisively shifted.
"Monaco has changed. It had to, to keep this event," Illman said from the harbour. Formula 1 has taken back control of the television coverage, stripping the local organisers of one of their most prized assets and folding the broadcast into the championship's own global production.
The arrival of Cadillac as Formula 1's eleventh team brought a more physical problem. A bigger grid needs a bigger paddock, and in a country measured in square metres rather than kilometres, space had to be found somewhere. The solution was drastic: a kindergarten and a school were demolished to make way for the expansion, with work beginning on the Monday immediately after last year's race and the children relocated to other facilities.
In their place stands a new three-storey paddock club reported to have cost in the region of 10 million euros — a statement of how much Formula 1 now expects from even its most historic venues. The old facility, Illman noted, had simply become too small for a sport that keeps growing.
The circuit itself remains the sport's great unchanging challenge. At barely more than three kilometres, it is one of the shortest on the calendar, and there is little anyone can do to lengthen the ribbon of track that threads between the barriers, the harbour and the hill. The one concession to racing in 2026 comes from the cars themselves: this year's machines are ten centimetres narrower, a change the paddock hopes will give drivers a fraction more room to fight on a layout where overtaking borders on impossible.
For all the upheaval, the atmosphere remains unmistakably Monaco. Drivers arrived for Friday's running by every means imaginable — some on bicycles, some on foot, others stepping ashore from sleek tenders. The sense of occasion is part of the bargain: even the race's harshest critics concede that the spectacle of Monaco, however extravagant, is unlike anything else in the sport.
That is precisely why Formula 1 and the principality keep finding ways to make it work. Monaco is tiny, and to keep the biggest annual sporting event in the world it has had to surrender control it once guarded jealously and tear down buildings to clear the space. The glamour endures — but the Grand Prix that returns each year is increasingly run on Formula 1's terms, not Monaco's.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/why-monaco-reinvented-itself-keep-f1-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
