Formula 1 CEO Chase Carey says some current events are likely to be dropped as the championship seeks to expand to prospective new venues, and remains optimistic that current issues in Miami can be swiftly resolved.
Under Liberty Media the sport has renewed agreements with several venues and has signed new deals with Vietnam and the Netherlands, while events in Malaysia (2017) and Germany (2019) were discontinued.
Next year’s schedule will feature a record-breaking 22 events and discussions are ongoing with several interested parties.
“Demand [to hold an F1 race] has continued to be a real positive, really across the world, the number of places interested,” said Carey during a conference call on Monday.
“We have a pretty full calendar and long-term contracts, there’s limits to what we can do, we do think there’s opportunity.
“22 [rounds] is a pretty full calendar but we do think there’s room still to add a couple.
“We want long-term partnerships, but just as we changed this year, we will add races and we will selectively probably end up dropping races.
“There’s a couple of issues we touched on in the past about races we inherited, with agreements we inherited which clearly were not reflecting the value we feel should be.”
Formula 1 has already announced an agreement in principle to race in Miami from May 2021 with a circuit to be based around the Hard Rock Stadium.
Local opposition to the race has caused delays but the Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez last week used his veto to overturn that opposition.
Providing an update on the Miami situation, Carey said: “There’s some steps to go, they’re very short term, the reality is for 2021 we really do need to resolve this in the short-term, say the next few months, for it to be a 2021 race, so we have time.
“The reality is most of the agreements are done, certainly the business agreements are done, so it really is the political issues around it, and they’re active.
“I’m probably not trying to handicap local politics, it’s beyond my pay grade, we’ll see, we think it’ll be a great race, we think it will be great for Miami and great for all our partners.
“We have other options in the US that we think would be exciting, but we’re hopeful about Miami [and] we’ll see where it takes us in the coming weeks.”
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