Supposedly Honda are happy to be out of F1, because that’s helping them to stay profitable.

But supposedly Honda are also slipping Brawn GP quite a lot of money under the table, with the team making comments that their budget is very healthy.

And then, of course, Brawn are front-runners who’ve won 3 out of 4 GPs this year so far. How much marketing value does that represent again? And how much of the F1 pie will Bernie end up giving them next year? Surely that’s a lot of indirect & direct value that Honda just gave away.

Personally I take Honda’s comments with a grain of salt. I suspect their public statements are the good old Japanese face saving stuff, while they’re really crying into their sake about a bad decisions.

do you reckon Honda has a buy back agreement with Ross especially with the new budget cap in place? Surely they can afford the operation now.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt last year. I thought after a slow start he got close to Vettel and was very unlucky not to score treble the points he actually did, but this year I think his excuses are wearing thin.

I reckon he’s got until Turkey…

I have been very disappointed by Bourdais so far, I thought he’d do better after showing flashes of promise in 2008. Interesting you link Senna to the seat, who do you suppose might take over from Piquet? Senna as well or di Grassi? Maybe they could go for someone a bit left field, Sato perhaps or dare I say di Resta? We can but dream!

If Piquet can bring in the kind of sponsorship figures that have been talked about in the past, then he could bring in a large chunk of the $50 million annual budget, even if he does drive his car into a wall every few weeks.

Did someone ghost-write your funny stuff last week?

Jonas

Typo corrected..

Mercedes – Parent company Daimler loses £1 billion in first quarter of the year. “F1 program” not directly threatened, yet, but it certainly won’t help.