Peter Sauber has put the first stage of his succession plan in place by transferring one third of the shares in his Formula 1 team to CEO Monisha Kaltenborn, citing the desire to retain “continuity” for the Hinwil outfit into the long term. Indian-born Kaltenborn has been with the Hinwil-based outfit for over a decade having initially joined to head up its legal department but has was given a front-line chief role by Sauber when the veteran retook control of his eponymous team at the end of 2009 following BMW’s sudden pull-out, becoming Formula 1’s first female chief executive. Sauber More…

Ferrari will benefit from a more powerful fuel at this weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix after partner Shell developed a new blend of its V-Power mixture. Engine development may have been ‘frozen’ in Formula 1 for several years but fuel is one area where improvements can still be made by the technicians of the various fuel companies involved in the sport. Shell is confident it has managed to make a “significant step change” with the latest blend without compromising on the previous version’s consumption levels. “Despite the freeze on engine regulations in F1 and F1 fuel regulations being the most strictly More…

McLaren is set to run with the higher nose it ran on the MP4-27 right at the end of the Mugello test in Spain this weekend, its team principal Martin Whitmarsh today revealed in a conference call with journalists, with the team also making changes to its pit-stop procedures in wake of the problems of recent races. Having bucked the trend for stepped noses seen elsewhere on the grid in the design of its latest car owing to its predecessor’s higher chassis profile, pictures from the final day of last week’s Mugello test appeared to show the Woking team’s MP4-27 running More…

Jacques Villeneuve retraced his legendary father’s footsteps in a special event at Ferrari’s Fiorano test track today as he took to Gilles’s 312 T4 to mark the 30th anniversary of his death. As a team firmly in touch with its past, May 8 remains a date firmly ingrained at Maranello as the day Gilles Villeneuve, considered one of the most exciting and inspirational Formula 1 drivers of all time, was killed in a high-speed accident during qualifying for the Belgian GP at Zolder in 1982. Given Jacques never drove for Ferrari during his F1 career, and actually famously battled directly against More…

Caterham’s young American test driver Alexander Rossi has spoken of his pride in returning his country to the competitive Formula 1 field after the team confirmed he would make his debut at a grand prix weekend during next Friday’s opening practice session in Spain. While the sport’s lack of a United States Grand Prix since Indianapolis’s demise at the end of 2007, prior to the advent of scheduled new races in Austin later this year and New Jersey (2013), has been extensively documented, the lack of a top-line US F1 driver has been a perennial problem for several decades. The last American More…

Teams put the frustrations of poor weather on the opening day at Mugello firmly behind them today to get their test programmes underway in earnest, as Lotus’s Romain Grosjean and Sauber’s Kamui Kobayashi ended up with identical times at the top of the timesheet. The second day of the sport’s first in-season group test since September 2008 at the picturesque circuit in Tuscany gave teams who have brought significant upgrade packages here a first serious chance to assess their performance in dry conditions. It was little surprise therefore to see numerous cars running with an assortment of aerodynamic-measuring sensors throughout the day. More…

Formula 1’s world champion team Red Bull is again giving fans the opportunity to have their picture feature on the livery of its RB8 at July’s British Grand Prix, in the latest initiative for its official Wings for Life charity. Both Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber’s cars will run with special one-off liveries throughout the Silverstone weekend featuring a collage of faces which have been uploaded to the Faces for Charity website created for the campaign. To get their face onto the cars, fans have to make a €15 (£12) donation to the charity alongside uploading their photo of choice, More…

Formula 1 teams will get their first chance to complete in-season testing in four years at Mugello next week, but HRT has opted to skip the three-day session in order to prioritise the relocation of the team’s headquarters to Madrid. Since making its debut in 2010 the Spanish-backed squad’s appearances in official group tests have been fleeting to say the least with the team, aside from the end-of-season Young Driver sessions and the first Pirelli tyre test, only appearing in pre-season sessions over the past two seasons with what were by then year-old cars. HRT went into this season with the F112 on the More…

Fernando Alonso is expecting the battle for the championship to distil into a much smaller group of protagonists than currently appears the case – and says that when that time comes Ferrari must ensure it is right in the fight. The pattern of the season’s first three races has mirrored that of 2010 when there were also three different winners from three different teams and a championship leader who had yet to win a race. Six different drivers have also stood on the podium so far in 2012, which is just one less than the total for the whole of last season. But Alonso, More…

Lewis Hamilton has spoken of his renewed happiness both on and off the race track after a start to the season which has taken him back to the top of the world championship standings for the first time in nearly two years. The tumultuous nature of Hamilton’s 2011 was well-documented with setbacks in both his racing and his private life contributing to his self-described worst year in Formula 1, but a productive winter allowed him the chance to re-focus and piece back together the ingredients he sees as being key to his personal equilibrium. Speaking to the British media in More…

Formula 1’s off-track focus in Shanghai may currently be trained solely on next week’s Bahrain Grand Prix and whether or not the Sakhir race will take place, but another race that appeared in serious jeopardy for very different reasons towards the end of last year – the revived US GP in Austin – marked an important milestone in the new venue’s construction on Thursday with a “topping off” ceremony for the pit building. Construction teams hold such symbolic ceremonies when they are ready to install support beams at the highest point of a building under construction and so, having reached that stage More…

Group Lotus has moved to deny suggestions that it has ended its formal involvement in Formula 1, the sportscar firm revealing details of a “reshaped” arrangement with the Lotus F1 Team that has seen its owner Proton give the Enstone outfit a £30m loan. In an astonishingly strongly-worded statement issued by the British-based manufacturer this evening hitting back at what it claims have been “mistruths” concerning both its F1 involvement going forward and the wider situation at the company, Group Lotus sought to clarify its relationship with Lotus F1 and Genii Capital following Gerard Lopez’s comments at the end of More…

Formula 1 now has two female development drivers after Williams announced that experienced DTM campaigner Susie Wolff – the wife of team shareholder Toto Wolff – has joined the team. Several weeks after Marussia signed Spaniard Maria de Villota to a similar position, Williams has taken on the Scottish-born driver who has spent the last six seasons competing in German touring cars, achieving a best finishing position of seventh on two occasions in that time. The 29-year-old had previously raced in British-based single-seater categories including F3 and Formula Renault 2.0 and team owner Frank Williams said that in addition to More…

The Lotus F1 Team has tonight issued a statement clarifying the intention of a report from which quotes attributed to representatives of the team appeared in an official Bahrain Grand Prix press release earlier today, the Enstone team saying it had been meant for confidential use only. On a further day of frenetic reporting over the situation in the Gulf kingdom ahead of F1’s scheduled return next week, Sakhir organisers took the opportunity to go on the offensive in wake of the increasing stream of negative reports with race chairman Zayed Al Zayani claiming “scaremongering tactics” had created “huge misconceptions” over the More…

Ferrari technical director Pat Fry has revealed that the team has managed to accelerate some of the ongoing development work on the F2012 in time to bring five new parts to the car for this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix, the Englishman believing the team need to find eight tenths of a second to get on par with the fastest team on outright pace. Although Fernando Alonso’s brilliantly opportunistic victory in Malaysia took him into a hugely unexpected early lead in the drivers’ championship after two rounds, neither driver nor team have attempted to mask the F2012’s continued underperformance in dry More…

Ferrari has revealed plans to mark the 30th anniversary of the death of one of its most revered drivers, Gilles Villeneuve, next month with a special event at its Fiorano test track. The Canadian legend’s son Jacques, the 1997 world champion, will drive the 312T4 with which Gilles and team-mate Jody Scheckter contested the 1979 drivers’ title, the crown going to the latter by four points as Ferrari also won the constructors’ championship. The elder Villeneuve won three grands prix in that particular car – South Africa, Long Beach and Watkins Glen – and it was also the challenger he More…

The use of the Lotus name in Formula 1 proved one of the most bitter and protracted sagas of recent times but a story that appeared to reach its resolution late last year has today taken a dramatic new turn with the revelation that the recently-rebranded Lotus F1 Team has cut all sponsorship ties with Group Lotus, little more than one season into a seven-year deal. Genii Capital co-owner Gerard Lopez, whose Luxembourg-based investment company owns the Enstone-based former Renault team outright, has told Autosport that the title sponsorship agreement that he signed with Group Lotus in late 2010 has More…

Adrian Newey, Formula 1’s foremost designer of the past two decades, was recognised on a national scale this week when he collected his OBE from the Queen at Windsor Castle. Red Bull Racing’s chief technical officer was recognised for his services to motorsport during a career that has seen him design multiple championship-winning cars for Williams, McLaren and now his current team. Newey had been honoured in the same New Years Honours List as Nigel Mansell – who took the designer’s Williams FW14B to the 1992 drivers’ title – the 31-time grand prix winner having received a CBE for his role as More…

Lewis Hamilton got to see first hand the hardships faced by street children in Manila this week when he headed straight from the Malaysian Grand Prix to the capital of the Philippines to record a short film for UNICEF. The 2008 F1 world champion met some of the estimated 85,000 children who live and work on the streets in Manila, documenting his experiences in the Binondo area of the city in a film that will air during the celebrity football event Soccer Aid that raises money for children’s charity UNICEF and airs on ITV1 in the UK on May 27. During his two-day trip Hamilton More…

Just under a third of the Formula 1 calendar is now made up of races in Asia, yet Caterham’s Malaysian owner Tony Fernandes believes there is still scope for the sport to expand in that region of the world. Before Fernandes’s country staged its first grand prix at the then state-of-the-art Sepang circuit in 1999 Japan was the only established Asian round, yet 13 years on and China, Singapore, Korea and India all now also hold races in their own right. The rise of Formula 1’s presence in Asia has gone hand-in-hand with a gradual shift away from the sport’s traditional More…

As the paddock went about its usual work on the opening day of a grand prix weekend at Sepang on Thursday, there was also time for reflection as several drivers made poignant trips to the circuit’s turn 11 to pay tribute to Italian rider Marco Simoncelli, who was killed at the corner during the MotoGP race there last October. The Italian was considered one of the most exciting and charismatic riders on two wheels but his life was tragically cut short at the age of 24 when during the penultimate round of the MotoGP season in Malaysia he died following a horrific accident in More…

Ferrari is readying a new chassis for Felipe Massa to use in this weekend’s Malaysian Grand Prix in order to rule out the possibility of anything “unusual” happening with his F2012 in wake of his torrid start to the season in Melbourne. The Brazilian struggled throughout the three days at Albert Park for grip and balance, qualifying 16th and then suffering from severe tyre degradation in the race which eventually came to a miserable end following a collision with Bruno Senna. In the post-race media briefings Stefano Domenicali said the team would “need to stay close to Felipe because it’s clear More…

Caterham may have got the season in which it is aiming to score its first Formula 1 points underway with a disappointing double DNF, and a five-place grid penalty for its lead driver at the next race, but the team has taken comfort from evidence which it believes suggests it can take on Formula 1’s midfield this year. Although the Malaysian-owned squad found themselves in familiar positions below the Q1 cut line in qualifying at Albert Park, technical director Mark Smith took heart from the race pace both Heikki Kovalainen and Vitaly Petrov were able to display prior to dropping More…

Last season on JA on F1 we brought you several features on F1 fuels and engines, as Ferrari’s partner Shell gave us behind-the-scenes insight into areas ranging from the mixing of fuels for an F1 race car and the management of the engine health process. While shedding light on many aspects of these two key areas of car performance, it became clear by reading through the comments section on the site that many questions remained. So, with this in mind, we collated the best of your questions and went back to Shell and Ferrari who together took the time to answer below on topics More…

Ferrari’s difficulties in getting to grips with the F2012 was one of the threads that ran right through pre-season and Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa concede the team goes into this weekend’s Australian season-opener still in a position where they need more time to fully understand the car – but remain confident it will get there eventually. In wake of a disappointing 2011, Ferrari had hoped to be winning from the off this season but in normal conditions that appears a rather forlorn hope at Albert Park given the problematic nature of the team’s winter. The inconsistent handling of the More…

Three JA on F1 competition winners on Sunday joined some high-profile Formula 1 figures in running the 2012 Silverstone half marathon in aid of Red Bull’s official charity, Wings for Life. In December we ran a competition on the site offering the chance to join the team Wings for Life, which funds research into spinal cord injury, were entering in conjunction with Red Bull Racing in the Adidas Silverstone Half Marathon, as well as the opportunity to train with James De Montfort, Red Bull Racing’s head fitness trainer, and a tour of the world champion’s Milton Keynes factory. On Sunday, JA on F1 readers More…

Ferrari team boss Stefano Domenicali says the team hasn’t given up on the original exhaust configuration which featured on the F2012 in the early stages of pre-season testing – and will try again at the Mugello test in May. The placing of the exhaust outlets on the 2012 cars has been one of the big talking points of the winter in wake of the FIA’s clampdown on the blowing of exhaust gasses to deride aerodynamic benefits. Having deliberately taken a more radical approach with the F2012 in a bid to jump both Red Bull and McLaren, Ferrari launched the car with More…

Marussia has paved the way for a female driver to compete in an official Formula 1 test at the end of the year by signing Spaniard Maria De Villota to a test driver role. The 32-year-old is the daughter of former F1 driver Emilio de Villota, who made two grands prix starts in the late 1970s, and made her F1 test bow for Lotus Renault at Paul Ricard last year. She has also had race experience in Formula Palmer Audi and the football-themed Superleague. Marussia team principal John Booth said: “We are pleased to welcome Maria to our test driver More…

Pirelli has made clear its desire to continue playing an active role in improving the Formula 1 spectacle through its tyres and today secured a more up-to-date car, in the shape of the 2010 Renault, with which to continue private testing through the course of this season. The Italian manufacturer was credited with helping transform the quality of the racing last year through the advent of deliberately less durable tyres and in recent months has been pushing to get access to a more contemporary machine, having run a 2009 Toyota since being confirmed as the replacement supplier for Bridgestone mid-way More…

Mark Webber is in many people’s eyes facing a pivotal year in his career in 2012 but the man himself says he prepares to enter his 11th Formula 1 season “the best I’ve felt for a while” and with the aim of showing people he can rediscover the form that took him so close to the title two years ago. With Red Bull team-mate Sebastian Vettel having very much not looked back since emerging on top against the odds in the three-way Abu Dhabi final race shootout of 2010, Webber, who led the now two-time champion German for much of More…

Key representatives from Formula 1 teams will again come face to face with the fans of the sport this evening (Wednesday) when the latest FOTA Fans’ Forum takes place in Barcelona. Following on from successful events over the past two seasons in the UK, Montreal and Milan, Spanish F1 fans are now getting their chance to put their questions and points of view direct to the men at the heart of the sport. And were are delighted to announce that you can follow what is again likely to be a wide-ranging and lively debate on all aspects of the sport More…

Lotus will return to the track at Barcelona on Thursday with its technical director James Allison confident that the chassis problems that forced it to pull out of last week’s test – which have now been confirmed as issues with the mounting of the upper front wishbone – have been fixed following an “intense” few days at its Enstone factory. After a promising start to pre-season when Romain Grosjean set the pace for 2012 cars at Jerez, the Frenchman reported the new second chassis as feeling strange on his first flying lap of the second test at the Circuit de More…

Yesterday we ran a competition giving the chance for JA on F1 readers to win two pairs of tickets to see the BAFTA award winning film “Senna” on the BFI IMAX screen in London’s Waterloo. To enter for a chance to win the tickets for the Thursday March 1 showing you had to predict the podium finishers, in order, for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, with the two winners chosen at random from the answers that matched James’s own prediction for Melbourne. As ever, thanks to everyone who entered and we can now reveal details of the winners. First things More…

Fernando Alonso believes it is important to Ferrari’s hopes of challenging for the world title that none of their rivals makes a dominant start to the season akin to Sebastian Vettel last year, should the Maranello team not be in a position to win from the first round in Australia. Team principal Stefano Domenicali confidently declared that “I am sure our car will be winning right from the beginning” at the launch of the F2012 but due to the innovative nature of the design compared to recent Ferraris the team’s pre-season programme has to date generally had to centre on More…

Marussia has become the latest team to run into problems with its 2012 car, the Russian-backed team tonight announcing that its new MR01 has failed the final FIA crash test and as a result forced it out of this week’s final pre-season test. The Banbury-based outfit had been hoping to roll out the first car to be built in-house in time for the start of Thursday’s four-day test, having run with last year’s machine during the first Barcelona test last week. However, those plans have now been scuppered following news that the MR01 has failed the 18th and final crash More…

Felipe Massa says Ferrari has been working hard at Maranello to ensure the new F2012 runs more reliably at this week’s test at Barcelona than was the case at the opening pre-season sessions in Jerez. The Italian team completed fewer laps with its new car than any team that was in action for three or more days in southern Spain two weeks ago, racking up just 270 laps in comparison to Lotus’s benchmark total of 404. The F2012 suffered from hydraulics trouble at various points of the week, while Fernando Alonso explained that the fact the new machine features so More…

Caterham has wasted little time in tapping into the opportunities the presence of Vitaly Petrov in its driver line-up offers up in the Russian sponsorship market by announcing the arrival of the country’s largest petrochemical firm, SIBUR. SIBUR was already a personal sponsor of Petrov when he drove for Renault last season and, in addition to its logos appearing on the Russian’s race suits, will also feature on Caterham’s CT01 this season. Following the decision to drop Jarno Trulli in favour of Petrov at the end of last week, Caterham team co-owner Tony Fernandes acknowledged the decision had been made More…

On Friday afternoon, fresh from the announcement that he had would be replacing Jarno Trulli in Caterham’s line-up for the new season, Vitaly Petrov took time out to speak to JA on F1 about his new deal and his aims for 2012. The Russian explains why he thinks he’s joined a team that’s going places and why it’s about time that people stopped labelling him as purely a pay driver.   First of all, congratulations on the Caterham drive. It must be a relief to finally have your future sorted and be definitely on the grid for 2012? “Thank you More…

Caterham has this morning announced that Lotus Renault exile Vitaly Petrov has replaced Italian veteran Jarno Trulli in its race line-up for 2012, appearing to effectively put an end to the latter’s 15-year Formula 1 career. Speculation had been doing the rounds for weeks suggesting that Trulli’s position was not as secure as the contract renewal the team announced it had signed with the 37-year-old former Renault and Toyota driver had initially appeared last September. With Petrov having been released by Renault/Lotus following two seasons at the end of last year in favour of Kimi Raikkonen and Romain Grosjean, the More…

Fernando Alonso says he has already seen positive signs from the new F2012 that it is able to generate heat into its tyres more quickly than was the case with its predecessor – a key aim for the team this year. Ferrari has struggled with tyre warm-up – particularly on the hardest compounds, where general performance issues have also been a perennial problem – over recent years and over the winter hired Bridgestone’s former F1 chief Hirohide Hamashima to focus on improving the interaction between car and Pirelli tyres. Alonso certainly thinks progress has been made judging by what he More…

Former Force India driver Adrian Sutil is set to appeal against his conviction for GBH handed down by courts in his native Germany last week. At the end of a two-day trial in Munich, the 29-year-old was found guilty of assaulting the co-owner of the Lotus F1 team, Eric Lux, in a Shanghai nightclub last April following the Chinese Grand Prix and given an 18-month suspended sentence and a fine of £166,139. But on Wednesday Sutil’s manager, Manfred Zimmermann, confirmed that his client was lodging an appeal against the decision. “We are convinced that this judgment is not appropriate,” Zimmermann More…

Ferrari’s most aggressively-designed car for a number of years made its track debut at Jerez on Tuesday, and afterwards its designer explained the approach the team is taking to the opening test of pre-season. The F2012 features a number of wholesale technical departures compared to last year’s disappointing challenger, notably pull-rod front and rear suspensions along with fundamental changes towards the rear of the car. Although the team’s recent cars have proved disappointing, Ferrari has nonetheless often been consistently at the sharp end of the winter testing timesheets with its cars invariably proving reliable out of the box. On Monday More…

Ferrari chief designer Nikolas Tombazis has admitted the team’s relative underachievement in recent years means the whole company is feeling the pressure to deliver consistent race-winning performances this year. At the launch of the team’s F2012 on Friday its management and drivers put emphasis on the deliberately more aggressive approach the squad has taken in the conception process for this year’s car, after being accused of lacking innovation in recent years. The car duly the most striking stepped nose of the 2012 challenger’s released to date, while the team has broken with recent design convention by reintroducing a pull-rod front More…

The team formerly known as Renault officially launched its new Lotus era today by unveiling its new car with the relatively low-key target of moving up one place to fourth in the constructors’ championship in 2012. The Genii Capital-owned outfit revealed the E20 – the ‘E’ in reference to Enstone, the team’s home of 20 years – on the internet but, rather than a live stream, released a novel pre-recorded broadcast from its factory which included the car’s unveil, interviews with drivers and management, along with behind-the-scenes footage. The black and gold-liveried challenger features the in-vogue stepped nose, but is More…

More than three years on from his last appearance behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car, and Dutchman Giedo van der Garde has been handed his biggest chance at motorsport’s top level yet after Caterham announced him as its reserve driver for 2012. The Tony Fernandes-owned team says the 26-year-old, who last year finished fifth in the GP2 Series, will make his debut for the squad in the forthcoming pre-season tests and then, like his predecessors in the role Fairuz Fauzy and Karun Chandhok, will “take part in a number” of Friday morning practice sessions during the course of More…

The forthcoming season is unquestionably an important one for Ferrari, and with just a few days to go until the launch of their 2012 car, the team’s race drivers have been completing their winter training programme in Lanzarote. The specialist pre-season training camp, in sunnier climes to the traditional northern European winter, has long been a staple of many teams’ preparations ahead of a new season, giving them the chance to put their drivers through some rigorous exercises as well as providing an opportunity for team building. Ferrari have chosen the Canary island for their training camp in recent days, More…

The new-look Caterham F1 squad has taken great pride from becoming the first team to show off its new car for the 2012 season this week and at its factory on Friday completed another important stage of the CT01’s birth – the symbolic first fire-up of the engine. From the outside this could seem like a trivial task given the months of design and development work that go into a Formula 1 car’s conception, but Caterham explained why the maiden fire-up of the Renault Sport engine in the new chassis was an important moment. “Firing up the engine for the More…

Caterham team boss Tony Fernandes says his squad prepares to enter the new season “light years ahead” of where it started in Formula 1 two years ago, and must now look to score points for the first time. A day on from issuing a teaser shot of the new CT01, the outfit formerly known as Lotus on Thursday officially became the first Formula 1 team to unveil a 2012 challenger via the front cover of F1 Racing magazine and on its own website. Steady improvement has characterised the squad’s first two seasons in the sport but technical stability under Mike More…