Emerson Fittipaldi

On This Day in #F1: 29 January

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Brought to you by TheJudge13 chronicler Carlo Carluccio – 1978: Michelin man to the rescue In the mid 70’s the Renault-Alpine collaboration designed and built a series of sports prototype race cars to contest the Le Mans 24hour race. Success here was of utmost importance to the French manufacturer due to the prestige that winning … Read more

On This Day in #F1: 19 December

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Brought to you by TheJudge13 contributor Carlo Carluccio – 1992: When Senna ‘impressed’ America!!? Yeah, right!! Nigel Beresford, Penske’s head of engineering: “..It’s funny to remember it now, we were there on this Mickey Mouse track next to a main road out in the desert and the greatest driver in the world was driving round … Read more

The #F1 Bar Exam: 17 October 2013

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Welcome to this week’s addition of TheJudge13 #F1 Bar Exam Last week’s question(s): Can you name the driver and the team in the photo. Can you also state the model of the car and in which year it was raced as well as who the main designers were? The answer(s) I was looking for were: The driver … Read more

On this day in F1 – 22nd March

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On this day in F1 – 22 March, is brought to you by TheJudge13 chronicler: Bart De Pauw – 1974: Fatal accident of Peter Revson During a test session in preparation for the 1974 South African Grand Prix, Peter Revson’s UOP Shadow-Ford DN3 suffered a front suspension failure and crashed at about 220 km/h head-on … Read more

Austinites view F1 like a folk festival, McLaren fundamental to Formula E 2014, Who is the F1 driver chain smoker? Teams sharing garages, 204 less pit stops in 2012, HRT sale forced by bank bailout request

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Bank bailout forces HRT sale: Meanwhile, the team travels to Austin with the minimum staff to compete and avoid a financial penalty from FOM for being absent (as.com). We may well see the cars qualify, start the race and retire the cars after one lap.

thejudge13 has previously reported that HRT are using parts way beyond their sanctioned life and has a debt to repay before December 2nd or face dissolution. Thesan Capital, we believe, is a front for the Banco Popular who applied yesterday for a bailout of 2.5bn Euro’s. The terms of the bailout are that all non-profitable assets of the bank must be identified and disposed of – including HRT.

As to the story that Colin Kolles is interested in buying the team, this is fantasy by Thesan Capital. He was ‘exited’ last December when the debt from Banco Popular was assigned to Thesan Capital who on taking control issued a statement explaining Colin’s departure, “This is due to the new direction that the team has taken and the decision of the new management to move the team headquarters to Spain,” it read. (Yallf1.com)

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Marlboro McLaren becomes McLaren Nicorette, COTA business plan highly optimistic, Lewis leaving was all about the money, Austin Council votes to tax COTA, New F1 film for release in Austin

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Vodafone scale down sponsorship:  It has been widely rumoured that Vodafone will be pulling out of its 6 year relationship with McLaren at the end of 2013. This has been considered to be worth as much as $75m a year, which is stratospheric compared to the fee’s most sponsors of F1 teams pay. Joe Seward has done a great article on this today, the link is at the end if this section.

The points worthy of comment are, Glaxo Smith Klien (GSK) has been extending its relationship with McLaren, and in a big announcement in the summer the announced a “ground-breaking collaboration” which will apply McLaren’s winning expertise to the needs of GSK, the aim being to help it to function more efficiently with more efficient planning processes and better modelling tools to drive faster decision-making. This includes the construction of a learning facility called the ‘McLaren GSK Centre for Applied Performance’, which is under construction at McLaren’s Headquarters in Woking.they announcedis setting up.

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