Baku organizers are not keen to turn their event into a night race, despite the wishes of Bernie Ecclestone.
Ecclestone wants Baku to join Singapore and Bahrain as events held under lights but the logistics of and costs equipping the temporary track are too much of a challenge.
"Having a night race adds quite a bit of complication," race promoter Arif Rahimov told this writer.
"The lighting that you need for broadcast is very complicated. Obviously it needs to be installed and dismantled every year, like they do it in Singapore. It's around $20m -- that's what I heard from other promoters, that's around the right figure -- and it's additional power.
"In Singapore they wanted this unique selling point. I think we have enough in this city to sell it. Maybe some time down the line, when people get used to this track and they conceive it as just another race to go to -- if they do -- we'll try to stir things up and introduce a new element to it. I think at the moment for the next five or six years it's going to be a must go to event, and what we have is enough."
Rahimov is hoping that the race doesn't follow straight after Montreal in 2017, as it did this year: "I don't think we're going to be back-to-back with Canada next year, because it was very challenging to bring all the stuff in by Tuesday, especially taking into account it was the first race. Obviously we had to learn how to manage things in the paddock. It went well, but ideally we would have had a gap before and after."
