McLaren team boss Martin Whitmarsh has insisted that Formula One's 20-race calendar in 2012 will be "manageable, if arduous" for the teams, suggesting that the current calendar may be the "natural limit" for the sport.
The 2012 calendar is set to be F1's first ever 20 race calendar, after a similarly-bloated planned schedule in 2011 was disrupted by the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix.Although the Bahrain race still has some issues over it, the current 2012 schedule still sits at 20 races, with the new US GP replacing the Turkish race.
Recently, Bernie Ecclestone has suggested that 20 races may be his ideal maximum for the sport, though has also hinted that he could expand the calendar to as many as 25 races in the future, with new events in South Africa, Mexico and France being mooted.
But Whitmarsh has admitted that the 20 race limit is likely to be just that for the sport, saying that any more than that would leave team personnel too fatigued over the course of an "arduous" season.
"I think 20 Grands Prix in a single season is probably a natural limit, to be honest," he told the official Formula One website in an interview.
"More than that would be overly wearisome for the teams - the mechanics especially - and would perhaps necessitate our having to explore inaugurating a shift system of sorts, as in NASCAR, where more than 30 races per season are commonplace."
He went on: "Clearly, though, that would trigger an unwelcome upward spiralling of costs, at a time when we're successfully managing costs downwards.
"But we've successfully tackled 19 Grands Prix in a season more than once before, most recently last year, and it was manageable then. So I reckon 20 races will be manageable this year, if arduous."
He also suggested that the addition of the sport's first in-season test since 2008 would not be a major issue, given that the three-day test at Mugello in May has been taken out of the team's usual 15-day allocation of test days.
"Last year we did four pre-season tests and no in-season tests," he counted, "This year we'll do three pre-season tests and one in-season test.
"So I don't think there'll be any significant difference [for the teams] from a 'gruelling' point of view, to be honest. Besides, a few years ago we used to go testing prior to every Grand Prix, sometimes in two separate locations at the same time.
"Whatever we do this year, or indeed in years to come, is likely - in my view - to always remain a far cry from the heady levels of testing we used routinely to manage a few years ago."
In-season testing was outlawed after the 2008 season in an effort to lower costs, but for 2012 teams will experiment with a single in-season test at the Mugello track. The test is set to run from May 1st-3rd.
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