FOM boss Bernie Ecclestone has toned down his recent baiting of the Australian Grand Prix on the eve of 2011's season-opening race in Melbourne, saying that the Australian race was "as important as Monaco" to Formula One.
Ecclestone has recently suggested that the Australian GP could drop off the calendar, following comments from Melbourne's mayor that the Albert Park track should dump the race after their current contract expires in 2015.
Although a number of purpose-built alternative venues have been mooted as far as future hosts are concerned, those all currently remain pipe-dreams.
And Ecclestone has suggested that if Melbourne is already tiring of hosting the race after 2015, then he could end their contract earlier than that.
But speaking on the run-up to the season-opener next weekend, Ecclestone has said that keeping an Australian leg of the F1 championship was vital to him.
"Australia is as important to us as Monaco," he shouted as sincerely as he could manage while on a teleconference with the Australian media.
He added: "It's part of the world championship and has been for an awful long time. We'd hate to think that we're going to lose Australia."
He explained, though, that he would not "force" Melbourne, or any other venue, to take over the responsibility of hosting the event after the 2015 season, should nobody be willing or able to pay the race fees.
"In the case of Melbourne, if the product is too expensive for them, we understand that and when the contract comes to an end there's no need to renew it," he smiled thinly.
"We wouldn't force somebody to buy something that they don't want or think is too expensive."
He went on: "We get massive worldwide television coverage - if that's not important well, okay, don't buy the product."
The recent anti-GP comments from Melbourne politicians follows the news that the race weekend continued to make a loss in 2010, despite the new frontrunning performances of Red Bull's Mark Webber.
But GP organisers have always insisted that the financial benefits to Melbourne as a whole for the tourism and trade the weekend brings in outweighs the loss the race itself makes.
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