Is *F1* coming to Hainan? Can this high-end roadmap succeed?

The last time I was clearing a huge map in a game, what excited me most was never the main story progressing, but that moment when I crossed a ridge and suddenly saw an entire new area unfold before me. Hainan’s launch of the F1 project this time gives me much the same feeling—it’s like discovering a previously unmarked path on Google Maps, a sign that this place still wants to keep expanding outward. For someone who cares about whether a world is worth exploring, if F1 really takes root here, what it brings won’t just be a race, but the opening of an entirely new content zone.

On April 8, the Hainan Provincial International Cultural Exchange Center announced that it had signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Dingji Automotive Culture (Hainan) Co., Ltd., officially launching the process of introducing and implementing the Hainan F1 Formula Racing project. This partnership is about more than simply hosting a single event. The public information makes it very clear that the next steps will revolve around bringing F1 events to Hainan, track construction, commercial operations, and the integration of culture, tourism, and entertainment. In other words, what Hainan wants to build is not a temporary event venue, but a continuously operating high-end automotive culture sector.

Following this line of thought, the project planning actually has the feel of an “open-world hub upgrade.” Zhang Zhuo, chairman of Dingji Automotive Culture (Hainan) Co., Ltd., mentioned that the project will use top-tier international F1 events as its core engine, with plans for a Grade 1 circuit, automotive modification factories, racing schools, integrated medical services, and five-star hotels, among other business formats. The Grade 1 circuit is the main city, the modification factories and training schools are like functional buildings, and the hotels and medical services are support systems. The goal is to create a high-end automotive culture industry complex that integrates cultural and tourism leisure, commercial consumption, and distinctive experiences.

But beyond the map itself, what truly determines the quality of this project is not how grand the concept sounds, but whether the content can actually be filled in afterward. Many large-scale projects look like enormous sandboxes, only for you to enter and find nothing but repeated textures: the track is just the track, surrounding consumption is just surrounding consumption, and there is no real linkage between them. Hainan’s goal this time is to attract high-net-worth individuals from around the world to gather locally and to promote high-end cultural tourism consumption in the free trade port. This positioning is very clear, and it also means Hainan must connect the influence of the event, the tourism experience, and commercial conversion into one complete route.

From an industry perspective, what makes this noteworthy is that the combination of “F1 + culture and tourism + consumption” is becoming a new trend. The Hainan Provincial International Cultural Exchange Center was established in 1992 and is a deputy department-level public institution under the Hainan Provincial Department of Tourism, Culture, Radio, Television and Sports; Dingji Automotive Culture (Hainan) Co., Ltd. was established in 2024 and is wholly owned by Changchun Dingji Automotive Culture Development Co., Ltd. On one side is a local cultural and sports resource platform, and on the other is an automotive culture enterprise. This signing shows that Hainan is trying to turn a top-tier event IP into a longer-term industrial entry point.

If you look at it the way a player looks at a new version’s map, I’d say this update is worth marking for attention first, but it’s still far from the stage of “diving straight in.” Whether the track can really be built, whether the event can be held consistently, and whether the surrounding business formats will turn out to be nothing more than high-end concept displays—all of that depends on execution going forward. But if it works, what Hainan gains will not just be a lively race, but a new map with a much stronger identity—one that opens up a route in China’s high-end automotive culture and culture-tourism integration landscape that can truly be explored again and again.