Celebrity Race Across The World is back for series 4, sending four celebrity pairs on a race around the world from Kuching in Malaysia to Melbourne in Australia. Sam Ryder joins the field with Kaz, his best friend and tour manager, as the pushes the format into its furthest route yet.
Kuching to Melbourne
The route starts in Kuching in the Malaysian state of Sarawak in north-west Borneo and ends in Melbourne, Australia. That span turns the series into a long-haul navigation test rather than a simple dash between cities, with the competition built around moving across borders without the usual shortcuts.
Four famous faces are on the line-up: Sam Ryder and Kaz, Ella Eyre and Nana, Jeff Stelling and Matt, and Princess Andre and Junior Andre. Each pair has to work through the same travel problem set, which makes the race as much about partnership as it is about pace.
Ella Eyre leads Celebrity Race Around The World 2026 line-up is one of the other early details around the new run, but the practical burden sits on every duo equally. With no phones and no internet access, they have to navigate, plan, and keep moving using only what they can work out on the road.
Rules that shape the race
The rules are built to squeeze the budget from both ends. Contestants get a limited budget, cannot travel by aeroplane, and can take temporary jobs to earn extra money along the way. That gives the race a stop-start rhythm: move when you can, work when you must, and hope the arithmetic still holds.
Some pairs can pull out if they blow their budget, while those that fall extremely far behind risk being eliminated. The result is a competition where speed is not enough on its own; the money trail and the distance between pairs can matter just as much as the miles.
Ella Eyre leads Celebrity Race Around The World cast over 7,500 km adds another read on the scale of the journey, but the bigger clue is in the structure: this is a race designed to punish easy assumptions. The lack of air travel, the cash limit, and the possibility of elimination force every pair to treat each leg like a calculation, not a holiday.
Sam Ryder and Kaz
Sam Ryder and Kaz give the series one of its clearest built-in storylines, because the tour manager is not just along for the ride; he is part of the travelling unit. That matters in a format where every decision, from transport to spending, lands on the pair rather than on an individual star.
The show’s own description of the new run as the "wildest race yet" fits the setup, but the risk is concrete rather than promotional. A limited budget, no phones, and no internet leave the contestants with fewer tools than any conventional travel race, and the first mistake can snowball fast when the gap opens.
Jo Gardiner dies a year after son Sam sits outside this series but shows how tightly viewers follow the wider Race Across The World universe. For this run, the cleaner read is simple: the format has been pushed farther geographically, and the rules now do more of the talking than the cast list.
