Monday 5 September 2016 09:11, UK
Grand prix racing's 'Temple of Speed' has been saved from the F1 scrapheap.
Monza, F1's oldest circuit and most long-standing race, this weekend agreed a new three-year deal worth €68m (£57.2m) with Bernie Ecclestone at this weekend's race after two years of wrangling.
And make no mistake, the moment the contract is signed will not just be a relief for those who have been involved in one of F1's longest sagas.
The Italian GP at Monza is what Wimbledon is to tennis and St Andrews to golf - a venue of immeasurable importance at which the lineage of the sport can be traced through the ages.
Only a handful of other venues, including Silverstone and Monaco, fall into this category but nothing has quite stirred nostalgia levels as much as the Spa-Monza double-header of the past week.
If the fact F1 and Monza had even come to this precarious situation is in any way surprising, the warning signs were certainly evident for a long time. In July 2014, Ecclestone described the existing contract with the circuit a "disaster for us from a commercial point of view", before pointedly warning "so it's bye bye after 2016".
Negotiations between Ecclestone and circuit operators SIAS, which is majority owned by the Automobile Club of Milan, over a new deal have since proved lengthy with the situation bogged down by a myriad of political quarrels over funding.
To complicate matters, Imola recently announced it had signed a five-year deal with Ecclestone to take over the rights for the Italian GP from 2017. But it seems Monza has been reprieved.
"We are very close to the signing," said ACI president Angelo Sticchi Damiani at a press conference on Wednesday. "I trust to close [the deal] in the three days of the Grand Prix. We worked hard, but with an important team game we have come to define the renewal of the contract. The investment required is $17 million more than the contract in force. We could not do it alone."
And it appears that very realisation at local and national government levels has allowed Monza to finally move to the brink of a new deal.
"Sometimes in Italy people forget that Monza is like having the Olympic Games every year - it is an event we have to be very proud of," said Sky in Italy's F1 commentator Carlo Vanzini.
"We need the whole country not to think of Monza as something for north Italy, Lombardy or Milan, but to think of it as the Italian Grand Prix."
Without doubt, F1 would be a poorer place without its oldest venue. While Imola would be a decent, and popular, fall-back - the former home of the San Marino GP and the host of the 1980 Italian GP - there is no other Monza.
Increasingly rough-and-ready the facilities may be, but the high-speed straights and chicanes which make up the 3.6-mile circuit are woven into the fabric of the sport. From the Rettifilo and the Roggia, to the Variante Ascari and Parabolica, Monza has remained a timeless challenge for generations of F1 drivers.
Future generations will thank the current guardians of the event if that remains the case beyond this weekend.
