It would be hard to imagine the All England Championships at Wimbledon alternating each year with the French Open at Roland Garros, but that is the arrangement Bernie Ecclestone has proposed for the struggling British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

In the light of the difficulties faced by Silverstone’s owners, the British Racing Drivers’ Club (BRDC), in making ends meet under the tough commercial terms on which it stages the British Grand Prix, Formula One’s ringmaster has suggested an innovative but controversial alternating arrangement with the French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours.

Ecclestone told The Times last night that he put the plan to the BRDC two weeks ago. He envisaged it coming into effect immediately and remaining in place for the next ten years. Next year’s race at the famous old circuit in Northamptonshire would have been sacrificed in favour of Magny-Cours, with Silverstone returning to the calendar in 2008.

The French approved of the idea but Ecclestone found the BRDC less enamoured. After due consideration at board level, it told him that it would not take up his offer and will continue with an annual grand prix until its contract with Ecclestone runs out in 2009.

“We’ve given them the opportunity and Magny-Cours agreed,” Ecclestone said. “Silverstone had the opportunity and said they didn’t want to. Silverstone stays where they are. We respect our contracts and we’ll see what happens when the contract runs out.”

The Formula One supremo has plenty of new races on his agenda, with planned grands prix in India, Mexico, Russia and South Korea, and has made no secret of his irritation with circuits he regards as tired and outdated, among them Imola in Italy — which is permanently off the Formula One calendar — Suzuka in Japan, which has been replaced for 2007 by Mount Fuji, Magny-Cours and Silverstone.

Ecclestone has a long list of improvements he wants to see carried out at Silverstone, but as a part of his swap proposal, he offered breathing space on works at the track that the BRDC estimates will cost £20-30 million. “We offered a ten-year alternating deal . . . and all the work they are promising to do, they wouldn’t have to do probably for four years,” he said.

Worryingly for British fans who regard Silverstone as a classic theatre of sport to rank alongside Lord’s, Wimbledon or the old Wembley Stadium, the BRDC made it clear that it did not reject Ecclestone’s proposal out of hand.

The crux of the matter was that running the British Grand Prix every other year would have made the BRDC’s financial position worse in some ways. “We said it doesn’t work for us,” Stuart Rolt, the BRDC chairman, said. “We were not able to see how a grand prix every second year works financially — we have to keep the place in a suitable condition for a grand prix — and in terms of staffing. You may be able to let some staff go temporarily and hire them back, but that’s a difficult way to run a business.”

Rolt was hardly optimistic about the long-term prospects for Silverstone and the British Grand Prix after 2009 and made the point that the BRDC, a club of racing drivers whose president is Damon Hill, is struggling in the invidious position of running a treasured national sporting event without government funding while competing with new tracks abroad backed by public funds.

He offered little comfort to British fans for the future of grand prix racing at Silverstone. “I really can’t reassure them after 2009,” Rolt said. “To me there is a danger that we cannot, or we are somehow unable to, find a way to fund the improvements or there may be a point where the amount of money we have to pay for hosting the Grand Prix becomes untenable.”

Ecclestone has never made a secret of the fact that he regards Magny-Cours as one of the first races he would like to get rid of and said that he regards Silverstone in the same bracket. “It’s not a case of it being a basket case, it’s a case of we’ve been asking them to do things for years and they keep doing nothing,” he said.