“F1 can survive without Ferrari” says Mosley

Yesterday I met with Max Mosley for a long interview which is in today’s Financial Times.
He was in London briefly following this week’s world motor sport council meeting where the £40 million budget cap was voted through.
I posted yesterday on the letters exchanged between him and Luca Di Montezemolo Ferrari president. Ferrari are very [...]

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Mosley’s response to Montezemolo

In response to the letter Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo wrote on April 28th to the FIA president expressing concern about having two classes of F1 car and about a possible legal challenge to the budget cap, Max Mosley wrote back the following day.
He quotes FIAT boss Sergio Marchionne, with whom Montezemolo works closely and [...]

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Letter from Montezemolo to Mosley

Although Ferrari is refusing to comment on yesterday’s budget cap announcement, some letters between its president Luca di Montezemolo and FIA president Max Mosley have come to light.
These show Ferrari’s concerns and hint at arrangements between Ferrari and the governing body, which Ferrari feel have not been honoured.
On April 28th Montezemolo wrote to Mosley [...]

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Flavio goes for it…big time

A furious Flavio Briatore continues to rage about the unfairness of Formula 1.
After some savage comments in Melbourne about the integrity of Ross Brawn, his former technical director, the Renault boss has now laid into the FIA and the drivers currently at the front of the field. He claims that a pecking order of [...]

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Why Gascoyne will be a hit on BBC F1

Mike Gascoyne is back in an F1 paddock for the first time since he was dropped by Force India at the end of last season.
Gascoyne is working for the BBC this weekend in place of his former boss Eddie Jordan. Gascoyne has had a stop start career in recent years, sitting out after being dropped [...]

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Bernie signs new F1 music deal

F1’s commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone isn’t here in Australia, he’s back in London doing deals.
One which broke cover this weekend was a deal he’s been working on for ages with Universal Music group, the biggest recorded music outfit in the world. They own dozens of the labels you grew up with like Polydor, Decca [...]

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Three commanding presences

An exhilarating hour spent in the pit lane during the first practice session. Strangely unfamiliar for me as it’s three years since I was last down there, having had to yield my pit lane pass to Steve Rider back in 2006. I used to live in the pits, back in the day, knew every [...]

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Irvine world champion under FOTA points plan

Here we go again. Another round of ‘what ifs’, this time based on the proposal put forward by FOTA for revising the points system this season. They suggest that the winner should be receive greater reward (12 points) and that the podium finishers should gain more relative to the rest.
So the mathematicians have been working [...]

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Lunch with Max Mosley…a busy year ahead

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 [...]

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Nigel Stepney breaks cover

No sooner did I mention in a post earlier today that Nigel Stepney, former chief mechanic at Ferrari and the man behind the McLaren/Ferrari spy scandal of 2007, was working for an engineering firm in Essex, but a picture of him pops up in a media mail out by Superleague Formula, the racing series based [...]

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