![]() It may not sound like it on the face of it as many teams and drivers would be heading back to the UK after a European race anyway - but because freight will be transferred on the road rather than by air, this back-to-back is a logistical nightmare. The 5,500-mile back-to-back between Montreal and Baku may now be a thing of the past, but could the Austria to Great Britain trip present an even greater challenge? Without October and his Sepang engine blowout, remember, Lewis Hamilton would be 2016's world champion. ![]() Just like last year, a bumper October sees Formula 1 travel to Malaysia, Japan, US and Mexico - and we will hopefully have another title battle being won and lost in this period. And what a quartet of Grands Prix they could be. While the German GP's exit has seen July's schedule eased slightly, we will once again have four races in a calendar month in 2017. With winter testing not beginning until the final week of February, any complaints from teams they have not had enough time to prepare for 2017's rules reset may well fall on deaf ears. Going further back and it's the third-latest start in the last 23 years. Next year's season-opener is one weekend later than 2016 and the latest start to any season since 2011, when Bahrain was cancelled. That's four months without any competitive F1 action between Abu Dhabi 2016 and Melbourne 2017. That's still plenty of planes, hotels and time spent arranging a suitcase but those on the coalface it is probably a welcome small, if temporary, respite for 2017.į1's longest-ever season is followed by one of its longest off-seasons, with the Australian GP not kicking off the 2017 campaign until March 26. That was the previous record for the length of a season set back in 2012 and in both historical and, most importantly, travel terms it remains a significant number for the F1 travelling circus to contend with. Twenty-five race calendars may be F1's eventual future under its proposed new American owners, but for 2017 the record 21-race schedule of this year is cut by one to a round 20. The race will be back in 2018 for the final year of Hockenheim's contract but unless Germany collectively rediscovers its enthusiasm for attending F1 races, or one of the country's two famous but tired venues suddenly stumbles across a treasure-chest of funds and marketing ingenuity, the country looks set to get used to holding a biennial grand prix at best. It was slightly up on 2014's numbers but when you consider 2015 was the first time in 40 years Germany hadn't featured on the calendar, and Hockenheim's break-even figure was 60,000, the writing was on the wall. The chances of Hockenheim filling the void left by the Nurburgring and staging the event in consecutive years for the first time in a decade had always appeared remote when this year's race pulled in a paltry crowd of 57,000. Germany has its third F1 world champion in the last 20 years but Nico Rosberg won't be staging a title defence - and there won't be a home race anyway, after the German GP fell off the schedule for the second time in three years.
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