The 53rd world championship-status Formula 1 Brazilian Grand Prix was won by Lando Norris two days ago – and, as is often the case when F1 returns to a country whose motor sport history is rich and colourful, as I watched him take the chequered flag my thoughts were transported to past Brazilian Grands Prix, and to the drivers, the cars, and the places that had raced in them, had been raced in them, and had hosted them.

Places? Plural? Oh yes. Although 43 of those 53 Brazilian Grands Prix have been run at Interlagos, in São Paulo, including the most recent 36 of them, and the race is therefore now synonymous with that city’s most famous southern suburb, once upon a time there was another circuit, in another city, that hosted Brazilian Grands Prix – and, although it was not as good as Interlagos, especially not the glorious 4.946-mile (7.960km) version of Interlagos that F1 abandoned after the 1980 race, it deserves more than an occasional passing reference. I am referring to Jacarepaguá, in Rio de Janeiro, which hosted Brazilian Grands Prix in 1978 and every year from 1981 to 1989. Oh and has there ever been a more sonorously named F1 circuit? I think not.

São Paulo is a huge, congested, noisy, grungy, and daunting megalopolis – the largest urban area by population outside Asia – and its attractions, of which there any many, are not immediately therefore apparent to the casual visitor. Rio, by contrast, is one of the world’s most beautiful coastal cities, sitting in a natural amphitheatre cradled by mountains and ocean. Its beaches are dazzling yet sociable; its nightlife is riotous, encouraging convivial, bacchanalian, and carnal unreserve; and the unmistakable aura of its elegant avenues lucidly bespeaks Cariocas’ and Fluminenses’ unwavering conviction that life should be lived slowly yet hedonistically.

But I digress. The modern Interlagos is still a mighty fine circuit, although it is shorter and tighter than its majestically undulating predecessor, which was one of the greatest racetracks of all time. Conversely, Jacarepaguá was flat and conventional, featuring a long main straight, predominantly medium-speed corners, and a layout that, while not without merit, could never inspire Interlagos levels of admiration. Nonetheless, four world-class drivers won F1 grands prix there, and between them they accounted for all 10 victories. Alain Prost won five of them, Carlos Reutemann two, Nelson Piquet two, and Nigel Mansell one.

Reutemann was the first of that remarkable roll call, winning at Jacarepaguá in 1978, for Ferrari, leading from start to finish despite having qualified only fourth, driving the fastest lap, and taking the chequered flag the thick end of a minute ahead of second-placed Emerson Fittipaldi, who was overjoyed to have put on such a good show in his home-grown Copersucar. Reutemann returned to win again in 1981, this time for Williams, defiantly ignoring the team’s clearly pit-signalled preference that he should surrender his lead to his team-mate Alan Jones. Reutemann was a brilliantly stylish merchant of speed, and a clever but complex soul, and after the race he declared that he would sooner retire on the spot than ever voluntarily give up a win.

However, Prost was Jacarepaguá’s most successful visitor, winning there in 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, and 1988. His first victory there, for Renault, was followed by four more for McLaren, and that formidable sequence of success was a testament to his redoubtable intelligence and remarkable consistency. He did not need to dominate every lap, nor did he have any desire to entertain us by doing something spectacular when something sensible would suffice. His approach to racing was consequently an exercise in calculation, anticipation, and the management of car and circumstance, and Jacarepaguá was a place where those qualities served him particularly well.

Piquet first won at Jacarepaguá in 1983, for Brabham, in a race in which second place was not awarded, then again in 1986 for Williams, demonstrating on both occasions the combination of technical intelligence, tactical awareness, and natural pace that won him 23 F1 grands prix and three F1 drivers’ world championships. He was a Brazilian racing and winning at home, and there was therefore an emotional dimension to his domestic successes, although he was never a man to allow sentiment to interfere with the matter at hand, and in recent years he has shown himself to be capable of making remarks that reveal him as unkind and boorish at best and racist and homophobic at worst. Jacarepaguá was renamed Autódromo Internacional Nelson Piquet in 1988, following his third F1 drivers’ world championship in 1987. (Parenthetically, you may be wondering why second place was not awarded in the 1983 Brazilian Grand Prix. The short answer is that no-one really knows, but the facts of the matter are that Williams’ Keke Rosberg was disqualified from second place for having been push-started in the pitlane and the FIA did not promote the drivers who had finished behind him.)

The fourth and final name on Jacarepaguá’s glittering F1 roll call is Mansell, who won there in 1989, in his very first F1 grand prix for Ferrari, a performance that announced his arrival at the Scuderia in a typically splendiferous way. If Reutemann was an artist, Prost was a strategist, and Piquet was a schemer, Mansell was a romantic zealot: brave, strong, determined, and above all very, very fast.

But, again, I digress. The Jacarepaguá circuit was demolished in 2012, its site repurposed to accommodate facilities constructed to support the 2016 Summer Olympics. The rickety grandstands, the shabby pit buildings, and the tarmac itself were all ripped up and replaced by a new sporting landscape, and with them went any possibility of revitalising a circuit that thereby became merely a small but significant part of F1 history. The Olympic stadia have had their moment now too, as they were entitled to, but I cannot help wondering whether the transformation was a satisfactory exchange. After all, an F1 grand prix circuit is not merely a collection of buildings and a strip of asphalt; it is a repository of memories, of endeavour and courage, of triumph and disappointment, and of moments when men and machines combined to produce something that transcends the ordinary. Once it has gone, it cannot be recreated, however many photographs and archive films survive.

Equally, the facilities constructed to support the 2016 Olympics quickly decayed, and efforts to effect repairs were stymied by funding crises. More recently some progress has been made, and Olympic Way – the main drag on which hundreds of thousands of spectators once walked to the various events, and under whose concrete paving the Jacarepaguá asphalt had once vibrated to the rumble of Ferrari flat-12s, Renault V6s, BMW straight-fours and the like – is now Parque Rita Lee, named in honour of the queen of Brazilian rock who died in 2023, in which more than 1000 trees have been planted, and which hosts acclaimed music festivals such as Rock in Rio.

All of the above is, for me at least, why the annual running of the Brazilian Grand Prix prompts so many reflections. Interlagos remains the natural home of F1 in Brazil – rightly so – and there is no rational argument for preferring Jacarepaguá to the old five-mile Interlagos, or even to the present circuit, which has staged more than its fair share of fantastic F1 grands prix over the years. But the past is not obliged to compete with the present, and the fact that one place was better than another does not mean that the lesser place deserves to be forgotten.

So although I never went to a race there, I kind of miss Jacarepaguá. But, withal, the circuit has come and gone, just as the Olympics took place there and – with due deference to Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, et al – were soon confined to the annals of sporting history. Ronnie Biggs eventually returned to live out his days in the country of his birth, breathing his last in a care home in north London in 2013, and I now live in Earlsfield, south-west London, a stone’s throw from the prison from which he famously escaped. Jacarepaguá – and Rio – accordingly remain vivid in my imagination for many reasons. Circuits disappear, cities change, reputations become recollections, memories acquire the polish of nostalgia, and, if the 2026 Brazilian Grand Prix reminded me of anything, it was that F1’s long-gone circuits deserve to be celebrated not because they were the greatest but because they were where some of the greatest once were.