If you thought this year’s 20-race calendar was already packed, next year’s is set to surpass it with a massive 21-race schedule for the 2012 Formula One World Championship. The tentative calendar approved by the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council includes all 20 grands prix from this year (albeit in a modified order) but with the notable inclusion of the United States Grand Prix. As the schedule stands, F1 racing will return to the U.S. for the first time since the last one was held at Indianapolis in 2007.
The gap is not the longest period Americans have gone without hosting an F1 race. Not by a long shot. No F1 race was held in the US between 1992 and 1999, from 1981 to 1988 and, longest of all, from 1917 to 1957 – though much of that period pre-dates the post-war establishment of the contemporary Formula 1 series.
Though the calendar was expanded by the inclusion of the round in Austin, Texas, for June 17 (one week after the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal), it could potentially shrink again if an agreement isn’t reached over the Turkish Grand Prix, which is listed with an asterisk on the tentative schedule.
The calendar is bookended by the season opener in Bahrain on March 11 and by the season closer at Interlagos in Brazil on November 25. In between are no fewer than six coupled races that follow one week after another in pairs, including the aforementioned North American rounds, the races in Malaysia and Shanghai, and the grands prix in Spain and Monaco.
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