The organisers of the Italian Grand Prix tonight confirmed that the historic track had signed a new deal with Bernie Ecclestone to keep the GP at the track until 2016, despite recent talk of a street race in Rome joining the calendar.
The new deal was announced by Claudio Vigano, the head of SIAS, which is the company that controls the Italian track.
Monza has held an almost uninterrupted deal to run the Italian round of the Formula One WOrld Championship since F1 began back in 1950, but had recently come under threat when Ecclestone announced that a deal had been done to bring GP racing to the streets of Rome in the next few years.
But the organisers of the Rome race insisted that the deal was for a second round of the championship in Italy, and was not a threat to the Monza circuit.
That now seems to have been borne out by the new deal for Monza, which runs until the end of the 2016 season.
"The Italian Grand Prix will be at Monza until 2016," Vigano told reporters on Thursday, "The extension of the contract has been signed."
With the Rome GP deal also presumably still on track, as it were, the F1 calendar is set to become more congested over the coming years. Ecclestone is looking to extend the schedule to 20 races from 2011, with an Indian GP scheduled to join the championship then.
But with Rome on the way and recent rumours linking the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with a return to the sport, some shuffling of the schedule will be necessary by Ecclestone.
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