Credit crunch, what credit crunch? Ferrari has just reported a record year for sales, with 6,587 new cars sold in 2008, up 2% on the previous year, according to Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper in Italy. The company turned over €1.9 billion last year. Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo said, “To get unparalleled results is the best proof of our strategy based on exclusivity, innovation and personal attention.” The USA again led the way as the No.1 market for Ferrari, with 1700 cars sold there, while China was up 22% at 212 cars. It remains to be seen whether those figures More…

I posted last month on Donington, which is due to host the British Grand Prix in July 2010, seventeen months from now. I gave details of a conversation I’d had with Simon Gillett at the Motorsport Business Forum in December. But now some worrying noises are coming out on this story, regarding the circuit’s financial position The story has run this week in the Mail, the Express and the Telegraph. It refers to the accounts for the year 2007, which were filed at Companies House on 21st January this year, three weeks ago. They refer to the eye-catching figures of More…

Interested to note that overnight Ron Dennis has made some comments which show that the top teams are shifting their view of the severity of the situation in F1 and the need for drastic action. Up to now they have been very resistant to the idea of talking percentages or numbers in terms of how much budgets might be brought down. But last night Ron said, “I think the top teams will manage to reduce their costs from between 10 and 50 per cent. But for the smaller teams it will be more dramatic, to the order of 30 to More…

Today we had all but one of the current F1 teams in action on the race track and over the next few days the mists will start to clear and we will start to see who’s quick and also how much slower the 2009 cars are compared with last year’s cars. Renault, Williams, McLaren, Toro Rosso and Red Bull were in action at Jerez in Spain, while Toyota, Ferrari and BMW were in Bahrain. I’ve not seen the full set of timings for the test, only the headline laptimes and you have to be very careful reading too much into More…

There were some interesting quotes from Max Mosley in the second media lunch last week (I went to the first one), which took the discussion about KERS and the challenge of designing F1 cars a bit further than the discussion of which I was part. Here’s what he said, “It is a little bit sad in Formula One and it is, in a way, our fault with the regulations. They have constricted the areas in which the teams can work, to keep the car speeds under control and also to keep costs under control, to the point where you get More…

The new Red Bull hit the track today, for all of 14 laps before being halted by a gearbox problem. Uh-oh. The gearbox was the Achilles Heel in 2007. Let’s hope that this is just a small teething problem. The car looks pretty cool, I like the long think nose and the experts seem to think that there is a lot of tidy detail there, showing that the extra time in the wind-tunnel has been well spent. The fact that Adrian Newey has been pushed into the foreground on this launch is interesting and tells me two things; first that More…

Red Bull launches the new car on Monday in Jerez and they seem to be getting quite excited about it in the build up to the event. We’ve had Mark Webber saying that it’s the best looking of the 2009 cars so far and their website is pretty gushing about it. It talks about the car being a creation from the drawing board (literally because he still uses one) of Adrian Newey. He’s overdue a real winner of a car and this year is a pretty vital one for the team as they have to take a serious step closer More…

Sebastien Bourdais has been given the nod by Toro Rosso for next season, alongside Sebastien Buemi. That’s three Sebastien’s in two seasons for that team, they seem to have a production line. I liked the look of Bourdais at the start and end of last season, but he fell away in the middle when Toro Rosso got the new car in Monaco and once it got the power boost of the latest spec engines from Ferrari around Silverstone time, Vettel was able to do far more with it. Towards the end of the year, however, Bourdais got his act together More…

Despite Ferrari team boss Stefano Domenicali’s suggestion last month that Michael Schumacher’s experience with slick tyres could be very useful to the team as they prepare their challenge for 2009, I see that Michael Schumacher said recently that he will not be driving the new F60. Schumacher, who turned 40 last month, has been a consultant to Ferrari ever since his retirement as a driver in 2006. He has driven as a super-tester on several occasions since then, but with restrictions on testing so severe now, he has decided that the work should be left to the race drivers. Schuey, More…

Today I went along to a lunch thrown by Max Mosley for a small group of journalists at the Poissonerie de l’Avenue, in South Kensington, London. The talk was, predictably, about the need for urgent cost cuts, the medals system, prospects for the season ahead, the future of the British Grand Prix, evidence of who set him up in last year’s sex scandal and his own future. On this last point I got the clear impression that he intends to stay on for another term. He has to make his decision by June and as he explained, they have a More…