David Culthard was asked about that in an interview earlier this year probably during the Silverstone race on Speed. He said basically, "Yes, I can see that Silverstone may not be the most modern track, but when you still have 100,000+ fans come out to watch the race, maybe that doesn't really make that much of a difference."

Just my opinion, but my feeling is that if you have countries like Malaysia and China that are willing to build brand new state of the art tracks (the Shanghai one last week was gorgeous, but I thought they said it cost $300M to build) and probably pay a good amount of money to Bernie if they can get a race there. If China perhaps is willing to build a new track, maybe pay for transportation, lodging for everyone etc, it might be tough to turn that down. The losers are tracks like Silverstone that aren't having huge companies/countries underwriting a lot of the costs.

Jeff