Concorde Agreement

Daily #F1 News and Comment: Friday 7th March 2014

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This page will be updated throughout the day. Please if you are on Twitter press the tweet button below. If you re-write and tweet individual story headlines don’t forget to include #F1. You may not realise how hugely important this is and has helped grow our community significantly. The month of March Join the TJ13 Predictor … Read more

On This Day in #F1: 25th February

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Brought to you by TheJudge13 chronicler Carlo Carluccio – 2005: Ferrari is the biggest star in the World The release of Terminator 2 in 1991 confirmed Arnold Schwarzenegger as the biggest movie star in the world. His films made hundreds of millions in revenue; thereby allowing him to command the salary he was paid. Twas … Read more

Daily #F1 News and Comment: Friday 21st February 2014

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This page will be updated throughout the day. Please if you are on Twitter press the tweet button below. If you re-write and tweet individual story headlines don’t forget to include #F1. You may not realise how hugely important this is and has helped grow our community significantly Webbuary Ecclestone ‘win’ is fairly hollow Raised eyebrows … Read more

Daily F1 News and Comment: Sunday 5th May

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Is the wizard of Oz F1 outed? Late last night, I picked up on a statement that hit my radar as ‘not normative’. Our favourite emperor, Mr. E, was asked about how the Concorde agreement is progressing. Previous responses have been fairly consistent. The teams (except Marussia) are a done deal and it is the … Read more

Adam Parr calls Ecclestone’s Concorde deal ‘a crime’ and the EU commission, negligent

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Follow thejudge13: Why not follow thejudge13 by email. Click on the button at the top right of the page to receive an email when (and only when) a new article hits the interweb.

I have now put 2 RSS feeds at the bottom of the right hand bar for those of you who know how to use them for updates.

Correction: Email I gave before should have been thejudge13@hotmail.co.uk

Big Thanks: To Craig Alderson who is going to run TJ13 second twitter account

Hijacked by Mercedes

Unfortunately for Adam, this would normally have been the lead story of the day (tue), crossing the North Sea at great pace from Germany. However, the tune to which everyone was dancing came from Mercedes AMG F1 super woofers – Lauda and Wolff.

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Ecclestone, Parr and the “Night of the long knives”

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A man speaks up

Remember back to the 3rd ever FOTA fans forum in Montreal 2011. Adam Parr, the then chairman of Williams, called for F1 to challenge Bernie Ecclestone over the direction of the sport. His basic premise was that Mr. E doesn’t really understand modern technology and is missing a significant number of opportunities to drive F1 revenue.

I think I heard someone else in the past few days suggests age was a factor mitigating F1’s CEO ability to operate competently. Parr said that night, ‘The way F1 is consumed is going to change over the next few years. There’s so much content you should be able to enjoy. Bernie has two or three cameras on every car. Then there are all the circuit cameras.

‘There’s an astonishing richness of material and we’re not really touching that at the moment.’ Assessing the way Ecclestone manages content, Parr added: ‘There are two things that Bernie thinks about. First, he likes to control the amount of material that’s available. He believes that rarity is an important characteristic of our sport.

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BIC promoters only expecting half a crowd, Kingfisher employees to disrupt F1, Discord not Concorde in Paris, 1st Lap of COTA more F1 News

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FIA meeting today: Press release 18:05 GMT – “During a constructive meeting, Jean Todt, the FIA President, in co-operation with Bernie Ecclestone, the Commercial Rights Holder, has presented to all F1 Team Principals the new structure of governance, including the new conditions of entry for the Concorde Agreement, starting in 2013. All the participants in the meeting were encouraged to seek clarification which resulted in a fruitful and helpful debate on how the new structure would operate in 2013 and beyond. A further important step has been achieved today to secure the future of the F1 World Championship which should lead to a final settlement to be reached between the FIA, the Commercial Rights Holder and the Teams in the coming weeks. (FIA.com)

On the agenda. The FIA is insisting on only 6 teams, Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes, Williams and Lotus to be part of the F1 Commision going forward. There were clarifications requested by the teams on the definition of customer cars and particularly the provision of 2014 engines. Renault has refused to increase the number of customers it supplies engines and with Cosworth up for sale this leaves Marrusia and HRT possibly without engines. Renault are objecting to the lack of competitiveness of these teams car designs, saying it is bad for their brand. A solution mooted is for them to buy a customer car from a larger team and then have an engine supplied.

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How Lauda got the top job in Mercedes F1

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It’s the old tale of ‘not what you know, but who you know’ that matters in life. I was extremely puzzled when I read about Niki Lauda’s involvement in mediating between Mr. Bernie Ecclestone and the board of Daimler Benz.

As I’ve previously documented, Daimler and Ecclestone were at loggerheads following the draft Concorde agreement as published before the start of this season. Such that Mercedes the car manufacturer was seriously threatening to pull out of F1 for good, or until Ecclestone was gone. (link)

Ecclestone in turn dismissed them as having “done nothing in F1” which poisoned the chalice further.

Such was the heated animosity between the parties you would think it was time to call upon one of history’s enigmatic peacemakers; one who had attained Alfred Nobel’s greatest honour; the like of Mother Theresa or Mahatma Gandhi.

As these 2 are unfortunately no longer with us, we must look to the land of the living and would probably settle on someone with the political nuance of Kofi Annan and the humility and wisdom of the Dalai Lama.

Enter the dragon’s den – Niki Lauda!

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Lewis keeps Mercedes in F1

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Now the dust is settling following the Hamilton announcement, there are a number of threads to tidy up, but we’ll start with some housekeeping.

Firstly, forgive me for some of the Tabloid headlines which are presently being used and are designed to attract attention, but we are a new blog and it is a good way of grabbing readers who have not heard of us. I will get to the headline of this article shortly.

Also, there has been a certain amount of cynicism over whether we do in fact have access to ‘inside’ information at times, but this is not actually that important except from the fact it is helpful when trying to work out what will be the next talking point.

More fundamental to the articles being written is that we’re trying to address the issues and the questions the headline writers and mainstream F1 travelling media circus miss by chasing the breaking news.

This will hopefully mean that we will call things before the headline writers do. Feathers in the cap so far, Jake Humphrey leaving the BBC a week before it was announced. Further, today a number of high profile media commentators who travel with the F1 circus have now begun looking at why Lewis has actually left McLaren.

One example is Martin Brundle who said on the F1 show on Sky TV that if McLaren had really wanted to keep Lewis they could have done quite a lot more. Without using the word “pushed” he acknowledged McLaren had been feeling the need to move on from Lewis as much as Lewis did from McLaren. Others you will have seen have been saying similar things in reflection a day after the big announcement.

So that’s 2 strong predictions in the first 2 weeks of the blog – not too bad – but a weekly statistic that will be impossible to live up to I suspect.

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