I agree. The price that FIA charges for the "cover" is ridiculously high. This drives the stand prices to over 500 dollars. That's too much, period. I won't go to Brazil this year.
How can FIA expect track owners to keep up with the cost of maintenance and to pay the cost of investment? The only people in the whole Formula One system that doesn't receive money are the tracks. This has led to a showcase of government funded tracks that doesn't have real racing roots and thus, lack the fans and the lesser series that can pay for the "Great Annual Race".
I think that this has led to the current situation, where cars that are enhanced every week race in tracks that haven't been updated substantially for decades. Only when the track is new you can find some interesting racecourses, like the one at last race. This very same tracks lacks any other significant races during the year. It's like if F1 lived in a "racing bubble".
In the same way you could think of building a stadium for the World Cup in a country where nobody plays soccer. The skeletons of so many Olympic Villas dot the world landscape in the same manner. They show that so called promoters lack any interest in promotion of the sport, they are interested just in brokering a deal that makes rich everybody except the owner of the facility, who always and everywhere is the proverbial mark for these con men.
This is what has led the open wheel racing facilities to countries with governments that are spendthrifts. If we ever need to find a definition for "unsustainable", we could always find the FOM team in charge of circuit negotiations team and ask them what it means and how you reach it.
Bahrain and Australia are perhaps next in this list of failed enterprises organized around one of the most lucrative business in the sporting world. P. T. Barnum would be delighted to see how minutes continue to tick and circuit owners continue to be born.
I, being no driver fan nor team fan, definitely am a fan of some tracks, and Istanbul is one of them. The only thing left to circuit fans is to collect the pictures of the old glories, where grass grows and appreciate the beauty of designs well ahead of its time, whose knowledge went down the drain. While everybody appreciates F1 technology trickling down to regular cars, the technologies devised to create some of the most spectaculars roads of this planet Earth are silently being covered by weeds.
Sitges Terramar, the master work of Frick Armangue. After 80 years of abandonment the excellency of its construction keeps it still intact.
