The row between the FIA and FOTA entered a new phase this afternoon as the FIA put out a statement saying that they were preparing legal action, “The FIA’s lawyers have now examined the FOTA threat to begin a breakaway series. The actions of FOTA as a whole, and Ferrari in particular, amount to serious violations of law including wilful interference with contractual relations, direct breaches of Ferrari’s legal obligations and a grave violation of competition law. The FIA will be issuing legal proceedings without delay. “Preparations for the 2010 FIA Formula One World Championship continue but publication of the More…

Max Mosley arrived in the Silverstone paddock midway through this morning’s free practice session and went straight into Bernie Ecclestone’s motor home. The announcement by FOTA of a breakaway series is no surprise to him, indeed he will have been expecting this. He has a huge appetite for this fight and he knows what a huge undertaking it would be to start a new racing series. The FIA put out a brief reaction earlier today as follows: “The FIA is disappointed but not surprised by FOTA’s inability to reach a compromise in the best interests of the sport. It is More…

Hi James, Got this message today from one of my readers, Charlie. Put a smile on my face and hope it will do for you too. “James, Do you remember me taking your advice and putting £20 on Brawn to win the Championship? at 15-1? well I got this email from Paddypower this morning: …..With the British Grand Prix around the corner and Jenson Button and the Brawn team still thrashing allcomers, we’ve decided to accept reality and settle all bets on Jenson Button to win the World Drivers Championship and Brawn to win the World Constructors Championship as winners! More…

I want to write about something other than the FIA/FOTA war today. There will be plenty of that tomorrow. It has been well reported that Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button have exchanged fortunes from last season to this. Button has gone from the back of the grid to the front and Lewis the opposite way. But there is a common factor in the success of both men and that is the Mercedes engine, which is made in Brixworth, about 20 minutes from Silverstone. Button visited the staff yesterday to say thank you for giving him an engine which has won More…

A tense day ahead at Silverstone for everybody. The teams have proposed that the deadline be moved back to July 1st to allow more time for discussion but that was rebuffed by FIA president Max Mosley yesterday. The FOTA teams sent a letter to Mosley with suggestions for a compromise to the issue of budget caps, and the method of financial control, “We detect… that a solution might be possible based on the FOTA resource restriction proposal but with measures introduced,” the letter said. “We would propose in this respect that we nominate a top firm of independent accountants who More…

There is a very exciting new piece of technology on the market for F1 fans. Soft Pauer, a company set up by former Honda F1 executive Otmar Szafnauer has launched the official Formula One Timing and Track Positioning Application for Apple iPhone OS 3.0. The application allows fans to track the progress of all the cars in real time on a dynamic track map. So when a car is losing time in the race, for example, you can see the icons of the other cars all bunching up behind it. The data is taken directly from the official timing feeds More…

“Williams needs a budget cap. Hopefully it will bring the others down to us.” This was the view of Sir Frank Williams on Saturday afternoon, discussing the ongoing crisis over the 2010 rules. Frank has signed up for the FIA championship next season. After years of almost bankrupting itself to stay competitive in F1, the Williams team welcomes the budget cap as an opportunity to take a financial breather, make the team profitable again and shape it up for a possible sale down the line. Frank is also attracted by the idea of housing one of the new teams on More…

The drivers working for the eight remaining FOTA teams got embroiled in the 2010 entry crisis today when they met with team principals and agreed to stand solid with them in opposing the 2010 rules package. Afterwards, rumours began to circulate that a repeat of Indianapolis 2005 might take place where the drivers would do the formation lap only and then park the cars, leaving only the Williams and Force India cars to race. Much as Nico Rosberg, looking for his first win and Vijay Mallya, looking for Force India’s first points, would have loved it, there was no substance More…

Jenson Button won the Turkish Grand Prix today, by 6.7 seconds over the Red Bull duo of Mark Webber and pole sitter Sebastian Vettel. It was Button’s sixth win from seven starts and sets him up now for the world championship and an emotional homecoming to Silverstone in two weeks time. “You have built me a monster of a car,” he told the team over the radio afterwards. He later added, “The car felt the best it has felt all year.” It was a dominant performance by Button, who started second on the grid, but passed Vettel on the opening More…

Formula 3 team Litespeed has announced that it’s F1 team name, if it’s 2010 entry is accepted by the FIA this week, will be Lotus. Last week we had a team using the Brabham name and there are rumours that March is going to be recycled. If it carries on like this we’re all going to have to start growing mutton chop sideburns again. Litespeed is owned by two ex Lotus engineers and they have persuaded David Hunt, who owns the rights to the name, to let them use it. Lotus won the world championship with Jim Clark, Graham Hill, More…

The fuel loads have been published by the FIA and, as expected the Red Bull of Sebastian Vettel is a shade lighter than Jenson Button’s Brawn. Vettel will stop on lap 15, two laps before Button. Button has the tactical advantage for the race because his team will be able to watch what Vettel does at his first stop and will then have around 2 minutes to calculate what strategy to employ for Button at his first stop to give him the best chance of winning the race. Button will have to watch out for Webber, who is on the More…

Sebastian Vettel was fastest in all three qualifying sessions today at Istanbul and picked up his second pole position of the season for Red Bull. Pole position changed hands three times in the final moments of a terrific session. First Mark Webber grabbed it, then Jenson Button went faster, but Vettel got the lap which mattered. Jenson Button again had a quiet build up, with various set up issues to be resolved in practice, but delievered a big lap at the end to start alongside Vettel on the front row. But the early indications are that the Brawn may have More…

I wrote a piece on the ITV F1 website yesterday looking at the prospects for the FOTA teams to start their own breakaway series, which they are being encouraged to do by FIA president Max Mosley. I mentioned that Max always makes the point that the FIA owns F1 and if teams don’t like it they can go and race elsewhere. The teams of course believe that they are the show. Mosley compares the role of teams in F1 to patrons in a restaurant; they may eat there every day and spend a great deal of money doing so, but More…

It has been a see-saw saga and it’s not over yet, but the chances of Donington hosting the British Grand Prix Prix next year received a positive boost today when it was announced that the legal dispute between the promoter, Simon Gillett and the landowners, Wheatcroft and Son, was resolved. This dispute threatened to wreck the planning application without which the event would be a non-starter. A statement posted on Donington’s website reads as follows: “Wheatcroft and Son Limited, and circuit leaseholder, Donington Ventures Leisure Limited (DVLL), confirmed that they have reached an agreement which they hope will move a More…

There have been some interesting suggestions in your comments as to the line up we may see on the grid next year, some of you clearly have some time on your hands to theorise and put drivers in cars. I’m not going to do that, but I am going to think about what the F1 grid might look like in terms of teams next year and take a snapshot of where we are with this delicate situation. The starting point is the teams who are legally obliged to take part next year. Williams acknowledges that it is one and Force More…

McLaren may have topped the times this afternoon in Istanbul, but Ross Brawn, who has been quite vocal in the run up to this weekend’s race, told La Gazzetta dello Sport that he thinks the steps Ferrari has brought to its car will be enough for them to give Brawn a real run for their money this weekend, “I think so, ” he said. “They have improved so much and on top of that they have KERS, which on this track is probably worth an advantage of 2 to 3 tenths of a second. It took them a while to More…

Jenson Button sat down with the media this afternoon and as usual gave a well-considered analysis of where he stands relative to the opposition. Jenson is clearly thinking a lot about all aspects of the rival teams, as is normal, but what is good is that he is prepared to share his thoughts with the media in a considered way. “I think that the Red Bulls should work quite well here,” he said. “The car that they had in Barcelona, if they brought that here they would be competitive. We’ll have to see if their diffuser makes a difference on More…

FIA president Max Mosley has broken his silence on the conditional entry the nine FOTA teams made last Friday to the 2010 world championship. Speaking to Swiss paper Motorsport Aktuell, Mosley made it quite clear that he is not going to entertain FOTA’s demands that the budget cap idea be abandoned, that the 2009 rules be carried over for next year and that the new Concorde Agreement be signed by June 12th, the date on which the successful entries will be announced. “You cannot sign an agreement which was specified so late, before June 12th.” he said. Clearly not willing More…

This weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix in Istanbul should see the convergence of several teams at the top, making it a fiercely contested race. Let me explain what I mean by that. Brawn has been at the peak since the season started, the team to beat, while Red Bull were very close in the early races, but only added their definitive double diffuser aero package to the car for Monaco, where it didn’t really have a chance to show it’s value. Their car has always been good on high speed corners, so in Istanbul they should fly. They have had the More…

I posted yesterday on Toyota and how they appear to have been going backwards in the last two races, wondering what they would be like in Turkey this weekend. In my mail box this morning is a Q&A with Toyota boss John Howett explaining a little more about what’s gone wrong and what their chances are for Istanbul. So I thought I would run an excerpt from it, to round out the picture. What are the team’s chances for the Turkish Grand Prix? “I believe we have a very good chance in Turkey. We are third in the Constructors’ Championship More…

Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix saw confirmation that Ferrari are back in business. Kimi Raikkonen qualified within hundredths of a second of Jenson Button with only two laps less fuel on board and in the race the Scuderia got its first double points haul of the season, with Raikkonen third and Felipe Massa fourth. On top of that, Massa set the fastest race lap, with 1min 15.154, four hundredths of a second faster than Jenson Button’s fastest lap in the Brawn and two tenths faster than the Red Bull of Mark Webber. It is tempting to say that Ferrari has now More…

Jenson Button did another first class job to win the Monaco Grand Prix from pole position today. He was followed home by Rubens Barrichello and Kimi Raikkonen, who gave Ferrari their first podium of the season. Barrichello got the jump on Raikkonen at the start, which was crucial for the outcome of the race as it kept the Ferraris from challenging at the end of the first stint when their tyres were superior. Both Brawns started on the supersoft tyre, the least attractive of the two tyres this weekend. This was quite a bold move, but it paid off for More…

It’s race day in Monaco. The weather has been fantastic all weekend and it’s perfect again for the Grand Prix. The crowds coming in today on the train were much greater than yesterday. Tens of thousands pouring into the Principality. There are still plenty of grandstand seats left, though at Tabac, St Devote, Swimming Pool, Chicane. Not surprising really as they are between €400 and €450 each! The most affordable place to watch from is the Rocks area looking down on the Nogues corner which leads onto the pit straight. It’s €70 to sit up there, but you are sitting More…

Monaco is always a tough race to predict because of the 50% chance of a safety car. For this reason a lot of teams split their strategies, putting one car on quite a light fuel load and the other on a heavier one. That way, if a safety car comes out early and wrecks the lighter cars’s race, the heavier car has a chance. Last year Sebastian Vettel went from 18th on the grid to finish fifth, thanks to safety cars and Lewis Hamilton could do something similar if fate intervenes. Jenson Button did a sublime job today, with a More…

Take nothing away from Jenson Button, that was a mighty lap this afternoon to take pole position for the Monaco Grand Prix, but Sebastian Vettel is left once again thinking about what might have been. The German, who is the Brawn drivers’ closest rival in the drivers’ championship, felt that he had the car today to challenge for pole position, but when it mattered he came upon Kazuki Nakajima on a hot lap, which wasn’t so hot and he lost vital time. Like so many occasions this season, Vettel has been thwarted, but F1 is all about making things happen More…

There is a fantastic interview with Fernando Alonso in the Gazzetta dello Sport today, in which he gently moves closer to talking about Ferrari and his possible move there. According to Pino Allievi, the number one writer on the paper, Alonso has moved to a house on the border between Switzerland and Italy, near Lugano. He spoke about the affection he has for Italy and Italians: “As a Spaniard I feel more at ease with Italians,” he said. “We have a lot of shared culture and character. We have identical feelings.” As for Ferrari he started talking about the team, More…

Although nothing concrete came out of yesterday’s meetings it seems progress was made and there is something still to talk about. Everyone seems to have calmed down and there was no more talk of Ferrari leaving the sport following the meetings. The boss of the Monaco Grand Prix, Michel Boeri, however did have something to say on the subject: “What would the Monaco Grand Prix be without Ferrari? A catastrophe. Like the Cannes Film Festival without the stars.” Picking up more details of how things are moving, it seems that the teams are pushing to have a more gradual reduction More…

Three hours waiting in the Ferrari motorhome this evening, for a press conference which was all set up for a 5pm start, but then that slipped as the meeting between the teams, the FIA and FOM rolled on. In the end we were told that the meeting was ‘constructive’ but inconclusive so there will be more meetings in the next couple of days. This means that there is some hope. There have clearly been some concessions on both sides. The teams and the FIA stood on the brink and stared into the abyss and Bernie Ecclestone worked hard to make More…

While we wait for the grands fromages to have their meetings and decide what kind of spectacle we are going to see next year and beyond in Formula 1, I thought a brief colour post might be in order. For the first time in years I’m not staying in Monaco this year. I’m in Villefranche, which is 20 minutes west by train. They have a fantastic train service here with double decker trains whizzing you along the coastline. Monaco railway station is a 10 minute walk from the paddock and the media centre. On my way in I passed a More…

I caught up with Fernando Alonso this afternoon at his press briefing in the Renault motorhome. He’s one of the few drivers to do this session on the first day of practice. I was interested to hear how good it felt to be back on the streets here, brushing the barriers, feeling that unique adrenalin rush of Monaco. His answer surprised me a little, “Not feeling good because being close to the barriers is not something you enjoy too much it’s a bit stressful. It’s always nice to be at Monaco and you get a different feeling, but it’s very More…

I wasn’t surprised to hear Jenson Button saying that racing is dominating his life at the moment. Button is like many drivers who have found themselves in with a chance of winning the world title. Presented with an unexpected opportunity to fulfill his lifetime’s ambition, Button is finding that he can think of little else between races. “I’m probably a right boring bastard at the moment, I really am,” he said. Jenson has always had a relaxed air about him in person and in the years when things were not going so well, he found it easy to switch off More…

This is going to be one of those weekends, where the buzz is constant and the drama level high. The strange statement on the Ferrari website denigrating the teams hoping to enter F1 seems to have garnered the most reaction, certainly a lot of the media are focussed on it. But in the wider sphere, the reaction has been interesting to the news from Paris that Ferrari’s injunction has failed. This is one of those moments when you need to apply a bit of perspective and calm appraisal, rather than run screaming. We’ve had some great comments on this site More…

On the official Ferrari website there is an extraordinary piece, posted today, which has a major dig at the calibre of teams lining up to join Formula 1 next season under the new budget cap rules. The tone is very disparaging. Under the headline “Formula 1 or GP3?” the following piece appears, “Maranello, 20th May – They couldn’t almost believe their eyes, the men at women (sic) working at Ferrari, when they read the papers this morning and found the names of the teams, declaring that they have the intention to race in Formula 1 in the next year. Looking More…

Ferrari has lost its legal challenge against the FIA in the Paris courts. The team had been laying the ground for the legal challenge for a while and had set great store by the outcome. Now the legal route is closed to them, they will have to try to persuade as many teams as they can to stick with them and not put in an entry for the 2010 championship by next week’s deadline of May 29th. The dreaded word ‘breakaway’ will be on the agenda. Although Ferrari felt they had a strong case in Paris, the FIA were more More…

For the first time in his career, Jenson Button goes to Monaco as the favourite to win the race. “To go to Monaco with the lead in both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships is fantastic but we saw in Barcelona that the performance margins at the front are extremely close. There will be a lot of competitive cars fighting it out this weekend, ” he said. He has won four of the first five races and even though there have been signs lately that the Red Bull car is more than a match for the Brawn, at a tight circuit More…

There have been some fantastically interesting comments in the last couple of days on the Ferrari story. Most people think F1 cannot survive without Ferrari, but I sense maybe 20-25% think it can. To me this boils down to an ideological debate about what F1 should be and how it should be governed. The manufacturers, having failed to achieve any change in the governance of the sport the last time they united – in 2004 – are now trying to finish the job off, knowing that this time Ferrari is on their side and is not going to be picked More…

Jenson Button’s chances of winning the world championship improved dramatically today with a fourth win from five starts. It means that from a maximum 45 points he has scored 41. And with the next race in Monaco likely to be one of Brawn’s strongest tracks of the season, he looks set to cut down the number of people who can challenge him down to an absolute minimum. It’s starting to look like he is uncatchable. It’s a good job we don’t have the controversial medals system in place as he would be close to clinching the championship now. Thus far More…

This is starting to remind me of 1992 when Nigel Mansell took a very good car and dominated the championship with it, after years of seeming like the world title might elude him. The difference is that then the Williams Renault was massively superior to the rest and Mansell was far faster than team mate Patrese. This situation looks the same, but it’s not. The Brawn is not a huge step ahead of the rest, in fact the Red Bull has now squandered two god chances to win in Bahrain and Barcelona. And as for the team mate rivalry, Button More…

The attendance at this year’s Spanish Grand Prix is noticeably down on recent years. This morning we drove in at 8am and didn’t stop once. It’s the first time I’ve been able to do that since Alonso came to prominence. His lack of competitiveness with Renault is a lot to do with the drop off in interest, I’m told by my Spanish colleagues. But also the state of the economy and the high ticket prices are having an effect. Nevertheless they are expecting 100,000 people here today, so more than Silverstone’s capacity. But they expanded the grandstand capacity here and More…

Jenson Button described his pole position here in Barcelona as ’the best pole I have ever had’ and it’s hard to argue. He crossed the line to start the lap with only two seconds to spare after a mix up with his team over track position, which caused him to find BMW’s Robert Kubica in his path in the build up to the lap. He thought Kubica was on a hot lap and let him through, but he wasn’t and he then had to drop back to find a space. But he onlt had four seconds to spare on the More…

Veteran Williams technical boss Patrick Head is here this weekend, and was typically good value in the FIA press conference this afternoon. He got stuck into several meaty topics, but the most interesting point was about the proposed two tier formula for next year where teams running under the £40 million budget cap will have technical freedoms such as more KERS boost, unlimited engine revs and an adjustable rear wing. “If you are able to move your rear wing and lower your drag level going down the straights it has a number of interesting effects on your lap time but More…

Jenson Button says that he is not happy with the performance of his Brawn Mercedes car today, the first day of practice in Barcelona. The car is equipped with the new aerodynamic package, the team’s first major development step since the season started. It features a new engine cover, new floor and new bodywork around the rear suspension. It is supposed to have given around three to four tenths of a second to the car. Rubens Barrichello was fourth today and is happy with his car. It looks very much as though it is still the strongest car out there, More…

I went along to Nelson Piquet’s press briefing yesterday afternoon. The poor lad is under some pressure at the moment, with speculation that he has this race and Monaco to save his seat. So far this season he has not impressed, struggling particularly in qualifying. Twice 15th on the grid, twice 17th he admitted that lack of testing had caused this problem, “Not getting pre-season (testing), not running low fuel, and then suddenly, when you put everything together, you can’t get the maximum out of it. Or you push too much and you end up overdriving the car. I think More…

This weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona will almost feel like the start of the season again, with so many teams bringing substantially updated cars. In most cases this is a response to the ruling that double diffusers, as used on the Brawn car, are legal. It will be fascinating to see who goes up and who goes down. Here’s my take on the things to look out for. Ferrari The reigning constructors’ champions have had a disastrous start to the 2009 campaign in terms of results and the car has not shown strong performance at any track, really. They More…

I always like to look at the fastest race laps, it tells you a lot about the relative pace of the cars and as this is the first ‘normal’ race on a ‘normal’ track it is quite instructive. The fastest car in qualifying and race was the Toyota. They should have won their first victory today, but they made the wrong tyre choice at the first stop and it left both drivers vulnerable. McLaren will be hugely encouraged by their performance here. From being over 2 seconds off the pace of Brawn when I first saw this car on the More…

Jenson Button and the Brawn team took their third win in four races this afternoon at the Bahrain Grand Prix, ahead of Sebastian Vettel, but the result could have gone either way. The two cars were very evenly matched. What made the difference was that Button was able to run in clear air and Vettel wasn’t. The key moment of the race was the end of the first lap, where Button was able to pass Lewis Hamilton under braking into turn one. This allowed him to run in clear air ahead of Hamilton, while Vettel was held up by the More…

Well…..not literally but we have just witnessed a new world record on the start finish line here in Bahrain, as the record for holding your breath under water was just broken by escapologist David Merlini. Not something you see every day.. The new record stands at 21 minutes and 29 seconds. A tank of water was placed on the start finish line and Bernie Ecclestone led a delegation of team principals as well as the drivers, standing around waiting for the new record to be set. The event was was staged by watchmaker Jacques Lemans, which has a deal with More…

Luca di Montezemolo arrived in Bahrain this morning to give encouragement to his Ferrari team, which has endured its worst start to a season for over 25 years. He talked of the team making the mistake of thinking it is the best and being caught out and called for a fresh attitude He also talked to representatives of other teams and manufacturers about the current state of F1. This is a huge week for the sport, It is essentially being restructured with new rules for 2010 due to be ratified on Wednesday at the FIA World Council meeting which has More…

Spare a thought for Mark Webber. He is sitting in a car capable of winning this weekend and yet he starts the race from 18th on the grid because another driver, Adrian Sutil, blocked him on his hot lap in the first qualifying session. Not his fault and yet he loses out massively and the feeling here in Bahrain is that this is turning into a real problem, which could easily affect the world championship. Last night the stewards penalised Sutil, who had weaved in front of Webber while warming his tyres for his own hot lap. He was dropped More…

The fuel weights the cars will carry at the start of the race are now public. Based on these the top performer in qualifying is Jarno Trulli, who decimated his team mate (half a second!) and was 2/10ths faster than Sebastian Vettel. The Brawn again shows that it is a better race car than a qualifying car, while Lewis Hamilton’s performance – on the same fuel as Button and only a tenth slower – shows that the McLaren is developing very quickly and will be racing the front runners when we get into the European season. I think they will More…

Today’s qualifying session again showed that the Brawn cars do not have it all their own way when it comes to single lap pace in qualifying, but their performance in practice, where they seem to have focussed on long runs, indicates that they certainly have the speed to go for the race win tomorrow. But they face a number of complications which may take the race away from them. Their lack of speed hurt them today and meant that they could not afford to carry much more fuel than their opposition for fear of falling down the grid behind Alonso’s More…

It is well documented that Ferrari has suffered its worst start to the season since the 1980s. If they fail to score a point tomorrow it will be their worst start ever. While both Renault and McLaren have been able to bring a version of the double diffuser to their car already, Ferrari is still waiting for its edition to come out in Spain. Against the backdrop of a significant step forward for McLaren, all eyes were on Ferrari in qualifying today to see whether they could get both cars into the top ten shoot out. As it turned out More…

It should be a very close qualifying session this afternoon, with a few different names up the front compared to recent races. McLaren look more competitive here than at any stage this season and while this will not be enough of a step for them to challenge for the win on Sunday, I fancy that one of the cars could be in the top five or six. Judging from free practice, McLaren has a car capable of getting into the top ten shootout and from there we could see them and/or others doing what Fernando Alonso did in China and More…

Flavio Briatore has spoken in support of his driver Nelson Piquet, who has endured another disappointing start to the season in the Renault. At the last race in Shanghai, Piquet was half a second slower in qualifying than his team mate, Fernando Alonso. But Alonso had the only example of Renault’s new double diffuser. Here this weekend the team has new parts on both cars, including modifications to the front wing and front suspension. The pressure is really on Piquet in qualifying tomorrow. Judging from today’s running the Renault is capable of getting both drivers into the top ten, with More…

More details have emerged today of the new F1 game, produced by Codemasters, which will replace the long standing Sony product. According to Autosport, “F1 2009 will come out in the autumn for the Nintendo Wii and Sony PSP, while a higher-spec F1 2010, with HD graphics and a more sophisticated gaming mode will be launched next year for the Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3 and Windows.” The game will be fully up to date, with all the latest tracks, latest drivers and the technical features of 2009 cars, like KERS and slick tyres. Presumably it will feature a lot More…

All of a sudden we have a rush of people heading for the revolving doors into F1. Hot on the heels of the news that Lola is lining up an F1 entry, comes Dave Richards, former head of BAR Honda and before that Benetton. Richards has unfinished business in F1. His time at the BAR Honda team was cut short after their most successful season in 2004. He has long been an advocate of cut price F1 and planned an entry with Prodrive which did not materialise because his plan was based on customer McLaren Mercedes cars and the rules More…

Fernando Alonso interests me greatly, as regular readers will know, particularly his pronouncements and predictions. He rarely wastes his breath on hype or pr. He’s focussed on what is possible and regularly achieves it, as he showed at the end of last season when he took sensational wins in Singapore and Japan. To see today that he still believes Renault can develop quickly enough for him to have a crack at the title is very interesting. “It’s still an early stage in the year and already the team has made incredible progress, which gives me the belief that we can More…

Good week for: Concrete bollards These largely overlooked and unheralded pieces of roadside furniture were given a welcome boost by Renault boss Flavio Briatore, who compared them with the F1 world championship leader Sebastian Vettel Peerless in the dry in qualifying, masterful in the wet on Sunday, the 21 year old is now soaking up the hype once reserved for Lewis Hamilton. Bernie Ecclestone is building him up as ‘better than Lewis’. Sebastien Buemi As the most junior of F1′s three Sebastiens, the Swiss risks being lost in the crowd, but he’s winning plaudits for his driving this year. Lucky More…

Form is temporary, class is permanent. That is the great adage of the sporting world. So what are we to make of what’s happening at the moment in F1? Is this the start of a change of order, with great names like McLaren, Renault and Ferrari in decline and new teams like Red Bull and Brawn the new top dogs? Anyone who says that would be guilty of serious short term thinking or buying hype. Those three teams deserve great respect for their record of success spanning many years, they are not to be written off so easily. You look More…

Renault boss Flavio Briatore said this weekend that the current pecking order undermines F1’s credibility. But today was a great race with great performances at the front from Sebastien Vettel and Mark Webber, who scored a Red Bull one two. Jenson Button and team mate Rubens Barrichello were struggling to get the wet tyres to work as well as Red Bull and managed third and fourth places. Meanwhile the grandee teams whom Briatore believes should be at the front, Ferrari, McLaren and Renault had another difficult day. Ferrari got no points again for the third race, Renault turned P2 on More…

Here is something new, something I’ve been working on for a short while. I hope you like it. I’ve joined forces with Darren Heath, in my view the number one photographer in F1. He and I started in F1 around the same time, 20 years ago and have been mates ever since. This is an audio slideshow of the Malaysian GP, with Darren’s photos and my words. Enjoy and Happy Easter! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWOTDQLSgdM]

It’s a shame that Jenson Button has yet to see the chequered flag at full racing speed at the end of a full race. Both his wins have been terrific, but this one today was really special and you have to pay tribute to the masterful way that the Brawn team, Button and his engineer Andrew Shovlin managed the changing conditions. Others, like Glock and Heidfeld made greater gains by gambling on wet tyres, and Heidfeld gambled several times with the result that he made only one pit stop compared to Button’s four. But then Glock and Heidfeld had nothing More…

Interested to see that Ross Brawn has started responding to the criticism levelled at him by Flavio Briatore that he has misused his position as chair of the technical working group by not declaring his hand on the diffuser issue whenthe rules for 2009 were being discussed. Brawn raised the subject early last year, he says and proposed that the rules be tightened up. “In March 2008 that was offered. If I’m frank I didn’t say ‘look we are going to do this diffuser if you don’t accept this rule’ because I’m not going to tell people what we’re doing, More…

Two races in and still no points on the board for Ferrari. Of course they can point to the effort put in to win last year’s title and to the row over the two step diffusers which Brawn, Toyota and Williams have, but the fact of the matter is that both of these races have offered opportunities for Ferrari and McLaren to score points but they haven’t taken those chances. In two normal dry races, maybe the diffuser three would have had an advantage, but these last two races have given the non diffuser teams opportunities, in Melbourne the two More…

After a dominant performance in qualifying in Melbourne, Brawn GP has been made to work a lot harder here in Sepang by the Toyota team and I think Toyota can win this race tomorrow. It looks as though the Brawn is about 2/10ths faster around here than the Toyota, but thats close enough for Trulli and Glock to put real pressure on Button, so he will have to keep the car on the limit, which could be interesting in this heat. Reliability is still not assured for Brawn, look at Barrichello’s gearbox, for example and they have not done much More…

This is going to be close! In Practice 3 this morning, Rosberg was fastest by a tenth, from Webber, Massa and Trulli, the three of whom were separated by a few hundredths. Then Trulli, Glock, and Vettel were all within six hundredths of each other. The question mark hangs over Brawn. There is no doubt that their margin over the rest is not what it was in Melbourne, certainly as far as single lap performance is concerned. Jenson Button’s long runs yesterday were competitive, but he has been struggling with understeer in fast corners and today he’s losing time in More…

In all the excitement of the McLaren and Hamilton apologies, we are forgetting that the cars have been running and that today they will go out and qualify for the Grand Prix. So what is the state of play here in Sepang. Well yesterday the Brawns were not dominant, even though every one expects them to be later today and tomorrow. The feeling is that they have between three tenths and half a second on the field, depending on which tyre they are on and set up. Yesterday Jenson Button wasn’t too happy with the balance of his car in More…

In an intensely feverish atmosphere here in Sepang, as the situation around McLaren and Lewis Hamilton ramps up and threatens to spiral out of McLaren’s control, a bit of light relief has been offered by Sebastien Vettel. The German driver says in the Red Bull press release reviewing today’s track action, ” It’s very hot and no matter how much you prepare, the first outing is a bad surprise. Fortunately I’ve got a bag with dry ice in it, which I put next to my balls, so at least they stay nice and cool.” Two questions, Seb. 1. What happens More…

A sensational press conference has just concluded here in Sepang, where new McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh admitted that his sporting director Davey Ryan deliberately set out to lie to the stewards in Melbourne and that he told Lewis to follow his lead. Whitmarsh suspended Ryan this morning and the New Zealander is on his way back to England as we speak. Speaking to a packed media centre, Whitmarsh said that this matter did not go any higher in the McLaren organisation and that he was not consulted before Ryan and Hamilton went to the stewards, “We knew what had More…

I will never forget the feeling I had when I saw this Brawn car for the first time on the Monday morning in Barcelona on the 9th of March. It looked different, the detail on the car was so refined, and it went like stink. Here was the most dominant F1 car we’ve seen since the Ferrari of 2004 and it was born out of the wreckage of the Honda team. Today they got a one-two finish in the first Grand Prix, making monkeys of the opposition as they went. How must Honda be feeling now? They pulled out of More…

It was Ross Brawn himself who made the connection, when we were talking on Saturday morning about the last team to win on its F1 debut; Wolf in 1977. “Yeah, I was working for them then,” he grinned. Ross started out at Williams, but when Sir Frank got involved with Walter Wolf, Ross was seconded to go and work on the black and gold cars. What an amazing symmetry that 32 years later Ross should repeat the feat with cars bearing his own name. Brawn was the story in Melbourne this weekend, from every angle; the staggering pace of the More…

Great atmosphere in the pits and paddock as the clock runs down towards the start of the race. There is a general acceptance that the Brawn cars are going to drive away at the front of the field. Their pace over long runs is even more impressive that their qualifying pace. Rubens did a great job yesterday on low fuel in the early part of qualifying, because the Brawn team did not do any work on low fuel running during their all too brief seven days of testing. There simply wasn’t time with all the other things they had to More…

The fuel weights have been published by the FIA for the first time, under the new rules for this season. There are some very interesting things here. For a start the Brawn cars are, as we expected, massively quick, given that Jenson Button’s car has 22 laps worth of fuel in it (59 kilos). Allowing for the fuel he will need to get to the grid and do the formation lap, this means Jenson will probably make his first stop on lap 20. Barrichello will go one lap longer, to 21. This is quite a long first stint for a More…

Finally after all the talk the protests and the politics we got some track action today. It was very weird starting the first session at 12-30pm and the second one at 4-30pm, basically two and a half hours later than normal. I got to the track for 8-45 am and there was hardly anyone here! Many of the teams were saving money on catering by taking advantage of the breakfast included at the hotel. By the time the second session was underway the shadows were lengthening and all the drivers commented on how hard it was to see in certain More…

It’s been a fairly calm day for the start of the new season. The predicted protest from the teams over the diffuser row has happened and the stewards are looking into it as I write this in the Melbourne press office, with the sun setting outside. I’ve felt all along that the three cars in question, from Brawn, Williams and Toyota will be declared legal. Charlie Whiting, the FIA’s top technical man, has approved the cars and you sense that he actually admires the innovative solutions the teams have come up with. Whatever the outcome we’ll have an appeal in More…

Williams picked up their first winners’ trophy in a while on Sunday, emerging victorious in the annual F1 mechanics’ football tournament at Milton Keynes. The event is organised by Grant Mundy, who is number one mechanic on David Coulthard’s car at Red Bull. A full compliment of sixteen teams representing most of the grid, took part in the event. Grant’s RBR team has been the one to beat in recent times, but this year the final featured two great F1 institutions, Williams and McLaren in a head to head. The weather was atrocious by the time the final kicked off, More…

Darkness is falling over the main stand as I write this. It’s been an interesting Thursday, devoid of the kind of tension we’ve experienced in the past at title showdowns. It has nothing of the atmosphere of Jerez 97 or Suzuka 98, for example. I’ve seen both title contenders in the flesh and they both look remarkably relaxed. The tension will start to kick in tomorrow. Massa has every right to feel relaxed in many ways, it’s out of his hands and he has nothing to lose. He will go for the win and hope misfortune revisits Hamilton. Hamilton has More…

Felipe Massa’s task in Brazil is clear; do what he has done the last two seasons and dominate the race. He looks like he has his head down a bit now, after being outpaced not only by Hamilton but also by Raikkonen in China. However he’s amazing at Interlagos and will no doubt be inspired by his home crowd, but there will be a bitterness about the experience too and this could really undermine his weekend. It’s a psychological issue and I’ll be watching very closely to see how he deals with it. Massa knows that there is a very More…

The way I see it, Lewis Hamilton travels to Brazil this year in a very different frame of mind from last year, much lighter in spirit, more focussed and with a much better understanding of what it takes to close this championship out. The most significant difference though is that he does not have to worry about  Fernando Alonso in the sister car. It was the Spaniard last year who dominated Hamilton’s thoughts at the finale after a season of bitterness and recrimination. Alonso felt that he could have won the title if McLaren had just restrained Hamilton a bit, and he’s More…

There is so much to talk about from the Japanese Grand Prix it’s hard to know where to start. We had Lewis Hamilton losing his head when all that was required was some pragmatism, Felipe Massa showing his ruthless side, Fernando Alonso and Renault again excelling and then a highly contentious penalty for Sebastian Bourdais, which gifted Massa and Ferrari an extra point reducing Hamilton’s lead to five points. Let’s start with Hamilton. Starting from pole, he knew that Raikkonen was a threat off the start line, but he also knew that Raikkonen was no threat to his championship position. More…

 As I write this on Friday evening in the dark at Fuji, it is starting to rain. Only lightly, but enough to remind you that the weather here can be very unpredictable and that rain is never very far away.  This morning the sky was blue and the view of Mount Fuji was spectacular. The two practice sessions took place in perfect conditions, but the locals are talking about rain tomorrow and a dry race on Sunday.  McLaren and Ferrari look pretty well matched again. I was interested in Ferrari’s performance advantage in Singapore over McLaren as it looked like More…

I’m off to Fuji tomorrow, full of anticipation. This has been a wonderful championship, where most of the races have been great and a minority dull. Last year’s Fuji race was very dramatic and had a big influence on the outcome of the championship, as Alonso lost the chance of points with an uncharacteristic crash. A couple of points that day would have made him champion at the end of the season. It just shows you that a split second error at this stage of the season is potentially disastrous, as Ferrari found in Singapore. This year Lewis Hamilton again More…

Formula 1’s first night race in Singapore has been a massive success. In a season of great Grands Prix, this was another classic race. Once again it turned on a safety car and showed the importance of race strategy in determining the outcome. And as far as the championship is concerned it showed that the team which makes the fewest mistakes will win the title. Ferrari had the pace to get a 1-2 finish here and before Nelson Piquet’s accident triggered a safety car on lap 16, it looked very much as though Kimi Raikkonen would jump Lewis Hamilton in More…

We’ve had a great day here in Singapore, it’s stayed dry and the cars did loads of laps. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to something new, even when it as completely different as this is. It’s clear that the track is very challenging and there is little margin for error. It will be a very tough race because it’s 61 laps and it’s a long lap at 1m 45 secs so you are looking at an hour and three quarters. It will be very physical because of all the corners and the humidity, so I’d expect some shunts. More…

We’ve had our first session here in Singapore and there was plenty of spectacular action and a few near misses out on the track as the drivers get used to it. At the end, Hamilton very nearly hit Fisichella who had spun in one of the blind corners and was across the track. Lewis was fastest, by a few hundredths from Massa and Raikkonen. Kovalainen had a huge moment at the final corner, as did Vettel. Luckily for bthe there is plenty of run off area there. Mark Webber hit the wall on the outside of the corner which passes More…

As this is such a new event and there is so much interest, I thought I would pen an occasional blog over the course of the weekend with extra information and behind the scenes insight. It’s Thursday night and everyone is still at the track, because it’s lunchtime in Europe and most people in F1 are staying on European time. It’s a bit weird going about your daily business at night, but for anyone who has done Le Mans or journalists who have covered night time football matches, it’s fairly normal. My plan is to get to the track around More…

Sebastien Vettel’s win in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza was a fairytale for Toro Rosso, but something of a headache for their competitors. Toro Rosso is a customer team, probably the purest example of the breed. They get a car from Red Bull Technologies, which is essentially the same as the Red Bull, except for the Ferrari engine and its installation equipment. Their win is not good news  for the teams who manufacture their own car, like Williams and there have been some murmurs that the old battles may be opened up again in light of Vettel’s win. It’s More…

Sebastien Vettel wins the Italian Grand Prix at historic Monza, in an Italian car, which isn’t a Ferrari and he does so from pole position, driving away from a McLaren. He’s the youngest ever winner by a year and everyone in F1 is happy for him. The story will go down in history as something very special. It is like James Hunt winning at Zandvoort for the tiny Hesketh team. The Toro Rosso team has Minardi DNA still running through its veins. Most of the guys who toiled for Paul Stoddard and Giancarlo Minardi are still there among the 168 More…

An extraordinary Grand Prix with one of the most exciting finishes ever has been given a different complexion by the stewards’ decision to penalise Lewis Hamilton for taking an advantage from cutting a chicane. There is not doubt that this is a very big call by the stewards and a lot of unbiased observers among the media and the public will find it hard to understand. It takes a lot to unpick the results of a Grand Prix, especially one which would otherwise probably be long remembered as a classic and a great advert for the sport. I’ve watched the More…

Actually it was a lot less damp than the forecasts said it would be, which casts serious doubt over the forecast for the rest of the weekend. Currently it says that it will be nice on Sunday and cloudy but dry for qualifying. If that turns out to be the case, then it’s looking pretty good for Ferrari. Their car works very well on tracks with long straights and fast corners and this weekend looks like being no exception. The interesting bit will be whether Raikkonen, who has won here three times, can use his undoubted ability around this place More…