Don't get your hopes up for any sports related franchises. Generally, the games' licensing deals with the franchise owners (car manufacturers, NFL, FIFA, etc.) expire after a predetermined number of years, after which the games tend to be pulled from sale everywhere, never to return.

Yeah.. a good example of this would be F1 2013 which got pulled a few months ago from steam. Presumably it happened because classic cars were included with the DLC.

F1 has new owners so you never know. Maybe in their desire to show they are different than Ecclestone, someone will remember about this game.

You can vote for it here.

But like everyone said the chance is very small.
Your best bet is to buy it 2nd hand, which I did a few years back like I did with all the racing games I wanted because now they are cheap and easy to find.

F1 Challenge '99-'02 was, ironically, the result of EA not renewing their F1 license for the 2003 season.

As OlivawR already mentioned, the new owners of F1 will hopefully have an actual interest in making F1 more popular, in stark contrast to Ecclestone. This should include the F1 gaming franchises as well.

Codemasters' F1 games have been selling quite poorly, coming from a big AAA studio that is.
So despite these games being made by a big and popular developer, they are still very mich niche games.

However, I think games are a good way to market a motorsport; if people enjoy the game they might enjoy watching it on TV as well.

As stated, there is a good reason why licenced sports games are few and far between at GOG.
Frankly, as far as Formula one goes, I would really like to see the classic Grand Prix Legends here, but am not holding my breath.

I agree with you. I started watching F1 after playing the games, and watching the races makes me want to play the games. It was the same with NHL games. Oh man, that is sad.

Which was surprising given how big a cash cow it's Franchise based Sports games are to EA.
I give you the John Madden National Foot ball league games as an example. A huge seller for EA every year, since they bring out a new edition every September when the new Football season starts.
If fact, it has become a major news story on the Sports Networks in the US as to which NFL Player will be featured on the Cover of the game.
It is a very lucrative franchise for EA even given it has little overseas sales;the sales in the US are so big as to make that a matter of little concern to EA.

Considering what it followed, F1 losing audience more and more, I think they really nailed it.

FIFA is played more outside the US, along with its competitor PES (by Konami). Still, EA backed out of several franchises, including Superbike and NASCAR, had a troubled history with NBA Live since 2010, and stopped making PC versions of NBA Live since NBA Live 08 and NHL since NHL 09. Things can get weird even with the EA Sports label.

Certainly. Just like the licence to NASCAR isn't tied to a million properties, sponsors, licences, manufactures, and a stripper named Cindy who accidentally won a miscellaneous legal deal, I'm sure the F1 properties would be just as easy, if not easier to make a clean deal on.

The thing about the old EA F1 games (and GPL from Papyrus for that matter), is that they were highly moddable. Replacement carsets with missing tobacco advertising and even total fantasy carsets were available and easy to apply. With that in mind selling these old race games with a fantasy car set, and editing all the driver and team names, and calling it "open wheel simulator from somewhere around 99-02" would avoid most licensing issues. The buyer could then easily mod back in their choice of real life car set, just like we did back then anyway. Remember Papyrus made GPL with fantasy teams anyway for Cooper and Honda because of licensing, and we all just installed the free GPLEA versions to get the real teams anyway.

But people probably wouldn't buy it if they needed to mod it, no matter how easy it is (and it was easy- self extracting installers).

Oh really? I'm glad I got it when I did, it's a really good game. Yeah looks like the 2011 and 2012 versions are still there. I wonder that it was that they couldn't distribute anymore?