With the sport yet to confirm the final schedule for the season, one thing is certain, and that is that it will not reach anything like the record 22 events originally planned.

Due to the fact that the amount of races has been reduced, not to mention the fact that drivers could end up missing sessions - or even races - should they or someone in their team test positive, there has been talk of reverting to the old points system whereby drivers only kept points from a certain number of events.

However, F1 MD, Ross Brawn, is keen to nip this particular proposal in the bud.

"We did talk at one stage of feasibility of perhaps dropping one or two results in the current circumstances," he tells the official F1 website. "The problem with that is the teams could 'game it'.

"They could work out how they could take advantage of an opportunity and you might find they get to a race where they aren't likely to score point because they are having problems, so they decide not to finish.

"That would look bad for Formula 1," he adds, no doubt recalling the ludicrous scenes during Q3 at Monza last year, when the teams took gamesmanship to a whole new level. "There's all sorts of gamesmanship that would go on if there was an opportunity to drop a couple of results, so we concluded, particularly as it will be a shortened calendar, it was better to leave all results in place.

"It will be a pretty exciting championship with a reduced number," he insists, "so I think it will be a valid championship. The best guy will win. We'll go to a great range of tracks and it will be as valid a championship as any other."