I didn’t think that anything could top last season, with the championship decided in the final corners and many races where most of the field was separated by a second, but talking to the teams, the feeling is that it’s going to be very close again this year, despite the massive rule changes, which normally spread the field out. The recent Bahrain test showed that Toyota and BMW are closer that expected to Ferrari at this stage of the game and the Toyota looks to be pretty reliable as well as fast. Meanwhile Ferrari and McLaren have also been paying More…

In the last hour or so I’ve read the story on the Real Honda F1 site about an imminent announcement of a management buyout and had an urgent message from one of my regular readers, saying the same thing. Real Honda clearly have some solid sources within the team, because they have broken a fair bit of news about the team in recent years. Meanwhile I don’t know what insights Finn has but he is most specific about an imminent announcement (see his comment at the bottom of the Bernie/Honda post). I’ve checked this afternoon with a party who would More…

Interesting tale in the News of the World today, where Ian Gordon has managed to get an exclusive with Bernie Ecclestone on how the Honda management team turned down his offer of financial help with their buyout of the team. Bernie has done a series of ‘exclusives’ lately; with the FT, the Telegraph, the Express and now the NoW. The Times has been his channel of choice for years, but he now seems to be spreading it around a bit more. This story is interesting because in it Bernie reveals that he proposed putting up some of the money to More…

As the momentum gathers behind a Virgin takeover of the Honda team, with Bernie Ecclestone throwing his weight behind the idea, I’ve been looking into how a deal might be structured and how that might compare with a management buyout, to see which is more likely and which Honda might prefer. I should stress at the outset that this is just a look at how these deals are done, I don’t have any of the precise numbers or inside information, but these kinds of deals are not that hard to analyse from the outside if you know the right people More…

I’ve just been invited to a press conference in Geneva on March 5th, where FOTA president Luca di Montezemolo will outline what the members of the Formula One Teams’ Association have been discussing lately. It’s been very intense behind the scenes, with all the teams heavily involved in discussions covering all areas of the sport. The invite says, “Luca di Montzemolo, the FOTA president, will make a speech in which he will unveil FOTA’s plans for the future of Formula 1. These plans are the result of a series of meetings held over the past few weeks and months, all More…

Kimi Raikkonen wound up his Bahrain test yesterday with a mixed day in which he set a competitive time, stopped for four hours with a KERS problem and then talked about the new Ferrari. This is an important car in Kimi’s career story because he really has to get on well with it if he is to stay with Ferrari in future. It’s no secret that he didn’t get on well with last year’s car and at times it left him scratching his head about whether he had lost his ‘gift’. Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali stressed at the end More…

Multiple motorbike champion Valentino Rossi turned 30 on Monday, an event which was greeted with congratulations and tributes from a wide variety of people, including actors Daniel Day Lewis and Tom Cruise. Day Lewis saw Rossi racing at Laguna Seca in California and praised his ‘death or glory’ attitude. “It was an honour to shake your hand,’ said the Oscar winner. I’ve always loved watching Rossi race. He has sublime balance and technique, an incredible desire to race and to win and he always makes things happen. He has that star quality which any sport really needs and yet which More…

I suggested on Monday that Virgin might be the ones negotiating with Honda and I see now that Honda has confirmed it. Already there have been some good jokes, like “I hope they are faster than their broadband!” But there is no doubt that Virgin would be a huge asset to F1 if it happened. The backstory here appears to involve Adrian Reynard, who knows Sir Richard Branson well, apparently and who set the BAR Honda team up in the first place before being eased out of the picture. Like David Richards, who also ran the team, he has some More…

Several F1 drivers took part in a televised poker tournament, broadcast here in Italy the other day, with Nico Rosberg emerging as the guy who knows when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. He won the tournament ahead of Robert Kubica and Giancarlo Fisichella. Poker has become a craze for F1 drivers in the last couple of seasons, started by Fisi and Kubica, with a regular game going on the table in the Force India motorhome, featuring Fernando Alonso, Bernie Ecclestone, Vijay Mallya and Rubens Barrichello as regulars. The TV tournament was also contested by Eddie Irvine (who More…

I’ve seen a fair bit of negativity around Williams lately in the media. I guess you can see why on one level, when you look at some of their sponsors; Royal Bank of Scotland, which is 70% owned by the British government, Baugar the Icelandic investment vehicle which was hammered by the credit crunch and Phillips, which recently announced thousands of redundancies. They also burned through a fair bit of cash in the last few years trying to keep up with the front-runners. So on the face of it, they seem to be a target, a team which must be More…