This was one of the subjects being discussed at the Fans Forum in London this week, where 150 fans came face to face with key team members and set the agenda for the discussion.

The panel for the Forum was led by Martin Whitmarsh, FOTA chairman and team principal of Vodafone McLaren Mercedes and featured Tony Fernandes, team principal of Lotus Racing, Jock Clear, Senior Race Engineer, Mercedes GP Petronas F1 team, Luca Colajanni, Head of Motorsport Press Office, Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro and Paul di Resta test and reserve driver, Force India F1 team.

Teams who wish to race in the 2011 and 2012 seasons must submit an expression of interest before then. The FIA will then undertake a process of due diligence. After 2012 there will be a new Concorde Agreement, but clearly any team which is accepted and which signs the existing Concorde Agreement will be part of the negotiation process for the next one.

This promises to be a hard fought and painful process as the teams will be looking for a far greater share of the commercial revenues of the sport than the 50% they currently receive. That negotiation will start at some point in 2011 and will get messy.

According to the FIA’s statement, teams who wish apply for the 13th slot must demonstrate to the FIA,

“(a) the technical ability and resources of the team;
(b) the ability of the team to raise and maintain sufficient funding to allow participation;
(c) the team’s experience and human resources;
(d) the FIA’s assessment of the value that the candidate may bring to the Championship as a whole. ”

The FIA anticipate that formal entries will need to be in by the end of June and they expect to announce the winner in July.

Stefan GP are the most proactive team knocking on the door and it is noticeable how much less bombastic they have become in the last few weeks since they failed to get USF1′s slot in Bahrain. They have stopped putting out messages and have kept their head down, which indicates that they have finally understood how this process works and are serious about being considered for the slot next time.

Prodrive is another team with F1 aspirations, as a vehicle for promoting its Aston Martin brand and there are bound to be others who failed to make the cut last time.

However the process is likely to be more closely scrutinised this time following the failure of the USF1 team, which is known to have greatly irritated the FIA and Bernie Ecclestone. This is also a source of embarrassment for American Nick Craw, one of Jean Todt’s key men in the FIA senior management, who championed their candidacy and must feel very let down by Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor.

Meanwhile today the F1 teams’ association FOTA came out strongly in support of the FIA’s ‘Make Roads Safe’ Campaign. All the F1 teams and their drivers will carry the branding of the campaign, which aims to save around 5 million lives on the roads in the coming years.

This campaign is part of the FIA’s strategy for making F1 relevant to modern society and leveraging it’s enormous communication power via its global media platform.

It is also central to the strategy for keeping Bridgestone in F1, by offering them the chance to be central to the promotion which will come from it.

It’s all about adding value to Bridgestone’s involvement in the sport. Bridgestone is in a very strong negotiating position, with little time left for another company to develop an F1 tyre before the 2011 season.

Campos is undergoing a name change today and this will be made public shortly. Sections of the Spanish media have suggested that it will be called “Hispania Racing”, in line with the new majority owner Jose Ramon Carabante’s business enterprises.

Kolles: Turning Campos German

The team will use the Dallara chassis designed and built for Campos and the Cosworth engines they have already paid for.

Adrian Campos is no longer involved; he was apparently offered an honorary position in the team, but turned it down.

Spanish sources say that Carabante has put €12 million into the team already and following a meeting with Bernie Ecclestone last week was encouraged to invest a further €12 million. Ecclestone has apparently assured him that he will get his investment back. It appears that he may be a saviour/broker figure rather than a long term investor, but time will tell.

There have been a lot of rumours that Volkswagen is in the background of this deal, but there are several problems with this theory. The first is that if VW/Audi group were to come into F1, they would probably start with Red Bull Racing as the energy drinks company has poured many millions of Euros into VW/Audi motorsport programmes over recent years in an attempt to get them to come in. And they are at the cutting edge of F1 design technology. Although Kolles is well connected in Germany and the factory will be based there, there are other teams with a better claim on VW/Audi’s attention at this stage than a team which is using a customer car and is starting from scratch.

The other problem is that there is no point in a manufacturer coming into F1 before 2013 as the engine formula will change totally then, so an investment in a 2.4 litre V8 for only a year or two of racing doesn’t make sense. It works for Cosworth because they had an existing engine they could easily adapt.

The rules for the 2013 engine will probably be specified later this year by the FIA and are likely to be very green and futuristic. Max Mosely wanted the formula to be based on fuel use rather than CCs. Jean Todt has indicated that he wants it to be road relevant. Either way it is likely to be a 1.5 litre four cylinder turbo or something of that kind with a big 120 KW electric hybrid motor, harvesting energy under braking.

The FIA will be sounding out manufacturers and potential manufacturers to see what engine would work best and once the new rules are specified, it is possible to imagine one or two manufacturers coming in if the engine is relavant to the motor industry of the future.

Ferrari launched its first hybrid car today, with a KERS system derived from the F1 programme, so this is clearly the direction of travel.

Meanwhile word is spreading from the USA that the staff at USF1 have been told today that the operation is closing down and the dream is over. Eddie Jordan has stuck his neck out again and said that Stefan will be on the grid in Bahrain, with Jacques Villeneuve in the car. He is acting on an inside tip off and this could be a smokescreen, a bit of tree shaking, but with USF1 collapsing and its driver Jose Maria Lopez in discussions with Campos, it looks like Stefan is making a mighty final push to get on the grid next week. The team has not managed to test yet because of a lack of tyres, but has the Toyota chassis designed for this year and a supply of its engines.

Incidentally the information that former McLaren sporting director Dave Ryan is with Stefan GP is incorrect. There were discussions but Ryan did not join the team. However former McLaren designer Mike Coughlan is there. Also negotiating with Stefan is USF1 investor and You Tube founder, Chad Hurley.

It has been suggested that Bruno Senna is required to come up with some money to secure the Campos seat he signed for some months ago and that Karun Chandhok is being lined up for the second seat.

He is the first driver to be officially confirmed by one of the four new teams entering F1 next season. Campos is backed by the Murcia region, but is dependent on sponsorship from drivers to secure its place on the grid. Senna has some money from Embratel, but according to Adrian Campos, it is looking less likely that Pedro de la Rosa will get a seat as Spanish sponsors are sitting on their hands at the moment. Vitaly Petrov, who raced against Williams new boy Nico Hulkenberg for the GP2 championship this season, has a good chance of getting the other seat.

“I hope, in a short time, that everybody remembers me for being Bruno and not for my uncle’s surname,” Senna said. “I’ve learned to live with it and although it helped me at the beginning to find sponsors and find contacts, to be a driver you need to have a natural talent.”

Senna says that Campos seems very well advanced with its chassis build programme and has already passed key crash tests. Among the staff it has recruited is Ben Agathangelou, one of the aerodynamics engineers at Jaguar and Red Bull who is very highly rated among people I speak to in F1.

Campos’ target for 2010 is to be the best of the new teams. That is the natural goal of all the new teams and Lotus’ Mike Gascoyne has already said that he believes his team is the most advanced and most likely to head the pack, “We have to be realistic but our aim during 2010 will be to head the group of new entries and continually reduce the gap between our performance and those of the established teams,” he said. Lotus has backing from Malaysian companies to the tune of £55 million, according to the BBC website.

Jarno Trulli is being linked with a seat at Lotus and so is Anthony Davidson, a favourite of many JA on F1 readers. These two would provide enormous experience and pace. Trulli gives the engineers an exact picture of how fast their car will go and Davidson is not only quick, but also a very handy development driver, who knows exactly where Brawn are up to as he has been their third driver and simulator driver this season.

Manor is split in three parts; the race team in Sheffield, the engineering and design in Oxford and the commercial department in Hammersmith, London at Virgin. I’m hearing Lucas di Grassi’s name linked to this team. He won Macau at the wheel of a Manor F3 car and has current F1 experience as a Renault tester. He has proven that he is on a level with the top GP2 drivers, so he deserves a chance.

Interestingly Toyota has made it clear that the intellectual property on its 2010 car design is for sale. It’s too late for any of the new teams to take advantage of that, as most are well down the road with their won designs and builds, but for a well funded team it might be worth looking at what a real state of the art car design looks like and to absorb some of the DNA. Toyota started and ended the 2009 season with a competitive car, one which was equipped with a well evolved double diffuser, which will be a fundamental part of a 2010 car design.

I have a feeling that the difference between the new teams and the existing ones will be of the order of two to three seconds per lap next season. It takes time to come up with a ‘state of the art’ package and that is what even the lowliest existing teams have at the moment. In fact one of the lessons of 2009 is that there aren’t really any ‘lowly’ teams any more. Toro Rosso ended up last, but they won a race in 2008, while Force India made great strides in 2009. Manufacturer backed Renault finished 8th out of 10 with a double world champion in the car!

Final note on new teams, the N Technology law suit against the FIA alleging irregularities in the way the new teams were selected has been thrown out by the court in Paris. The reasons for the judgement will be published soon.