Ferrari

A Race with over 300 cars, Lotus developing 3 cars at once, Mallya’s license suspended, more F1 News….

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Mallya: The judge13 has been following more closely than elsewhere the events unfolding that affect the Indian owner of Force India. Having sold a chunk of the Kingfisher empire this week, paid overdue airport dues and had the warrant for arrest withdrawn, Mallya has now had his airline license withdrawn. The suspension signalled the regulator’s lack of patience with Kingfisher after months of cancelled flights and staff walkouts, and marked a rare tough stance by the government against a high-profile corporate (Reuters)

The move had been widely expected after Kingfisher failed to respond properly to queries from the regulator regarding its ability to provide a “safe, efficient and reliable service”. The airline has never made a profit since its inception in 2004, and a well know airline commentator suggests it could take $1bn to turn Kingfisher Airlines around. (Force India: How the card tower will collapse)

Max Mosely: A very plausible and knowledgeable guest on the Sky F1 show admitted the expose of his by the News of the World of ‘spankgate’ weakened his hand in pushing through cost reforms.  In 2003 Mosely, then head of the FIA, cancelled the use of special qualifying cars and engines in a move to level the playing field for the competing F1 teams. He instigated a ‘parc ferme’ following qualifying that meant the teams could not change engines and other components designed to provide ultra 1 lap speed but not be capable of lasting the full race distance.

In 2008-9 Mosely was trying force the teams to agree to a cost cap on expenditure, and Ferrari in particular were refusing to comply, there were threats of a breakaway series and Moseley admits he should have faced them down as he did in 2003. The reason he gave for avoiding all out confrontation was that Williams and Ferrari in particular had supported Mosely during the highly embarrassing matter of ‘spankgate’ and he felt he owed them for this loyalty. So Max agreed not to stand for re-election and the fudged Resource Restriction Agreement was accepted, something Mosely now admits is not working.

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Mallya forced to relinquish Control, Ecclestone U-turn, Tooned Cancelled, Sky F1 reporting gets even worse

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London GP: Ecclestone says the race is off that was never on. London – city or Olympic Park http://www.cityam.com/sport/central-london-grand-prix-says-ecclestone. I love how he then goes to great lengths to explain why it would be cost efficient and a great idea though. Maybe this undying enthusiasm for pointless ideas and lost causes is how Mokpo not Seoul ended up with the Korean GP (South Korea, Ecclestone and The Emporer’s New Clothes)

Tooned: is cancelled due to Lewis leaving the team – so for the rest of this year at least. Would love to see it return with Jenson and Perez next year. Perez character could be based on being a relative of my childhood favourite cartoon, Speedy Gonzales, a very very fast mexican mouse. For those of you who’ve never had the pleasure…(YouTube). If you enjoyed that and want a free box set worth of them…(YouTube). More importantly Tooned is a way of attracting kids interest in F1 and was a good idea. I think they should just do a best mates breakup story about Lewis and Jenson anyway. My best mate aged 22 didn’t speak to me for a year – its life.

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Monday Post Korea Blues: Mercedes woeful slide continues, BBC story panics Red Bull and more…

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Funny how from week to week the Monday morning feeling following and F1 weekend can be quite different. With Japan and Korea being back to back the contrast is stark. Last Monday, I was still buzzing from the Japanese GP. not that the battle for the win was great, but there was a lot of good racing down the pack, the fans were amazing, Kamui getting his podium at last before he loses his F1 seat, Grosjean’s latest incident…lots of stuff to think about and write about.

Today…Zzz…I’m struggling. Part of the reason is I think my post race thoughts posted yesterday for Korea was more comprehensive than the one from Japan, so there are fewer loose ends to tie up today. Another the reason is that the F1 circus is battling its way back from the remote part of S. Korea and today is a quiet news days. Any way let’s see what’s going on.

BBC – Old News and Wrong News

You can spot quiet news days, for example, today the BBC F1 story is a re-hash of something we have known about for months – Vettel/Ferrari possibly/maybe 2014. Even so, someone at Red Bull just told me the team have been forced into action and brought forward their post race debrief from Tuesday to today 3:30pm – to quash the rumours.

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Lauda to sack Brackley personnel, Nascar mother of all pile ups, Lola closes doors, Tooned will be ‘racey’

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After battling with F1 and global finance until gone midnight on “Ecclestone to load a mountain of debt on F1“, then the day so far has been spent with lawyers – so we’ll start with a News Links post and see if I’ve got enough time and energy for an in depth article later. (Anything in wite on this page is a URL link to the original or pic or video).

Quick thanks to someone on German site MotorsportTotal.com who posted a link to thejudge13 and we’ve had over 50 new German visitors today from their site. Great work.

  1. Last week I did a couple of articles on Niki Lauda, suggesting there may be fireworks at Merceds F1 now he’s the big boss (a position he couldn’t help refering to on TV at the weekend I noticed). Niki’s inability to “suffer fools gladly” is legendary. So today, our favourite German publication Bilde has the following, “Schumi’s car builders are fired”. (I always put the link to prove the source, but be careful with any translation software – particularly verb tenses). Anyway Christian Danner RTL expert pundit and ex F1 driver of note (I’ll come back to this) says today that Niki Lauda needs to fire the designers of this years car. He suggests that after 9 months the car is performing like a Torro Rosso and heads must roll. He urges Niki the hatchetman on, “He is responsible to make the next decision. And the next decisions will be primarily personnel decisions”. RTL commentator Danner, a little bit like Mr. J Herbert for SKY, drove in Formula 1 over 4 years. 2 of those he was not classified with any points and had a career best P4 in USA 1989 when he also had his best season scoring a total of 4 points. WATCH OUT ROSS

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Schumacher Retires – Really?

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So Michael announces his retirement in Suzuka. Adam Cooper has the full and rather emotional speech here, so I won’t publish it all. What surprises me is that Schumacher has been driving pretty well this year, here’s some head to heads

Head to Head – Schumacher/Rosberg/Massa

Ave grid position                     Ave qualifying time outside poll position

7.5     Schmacher                    0.936secs    Schumacher

8.5     Rosberg                         1.145secs    Rosberg

10.8   Massa                            1.095secs    Massa

Ave finish position                 Head to head qualifying

7.1      Schumacher                Schumacher/Massa       10 to 4

8.1      Rosberg                       Schumacher/Rosberg    8   to 6

9.8      Massa

Finished ahead of (completed races)

Schumacher/Massa        3 to 4

Schumacher/Rosberg     6 to 1

People have criticised Schumacher for not finishing enough races, 7 in fact, but If you consider the list of problems Schumacher has had, his contribution has been minimal (in bold)

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Schauber or Ferrari? Schumacher’s options

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Considering the Hamilton and Perez moves were announced practically simultaneously, the mystery surrounding Michael Schumacher’s future remains. As usual picking the bones out of what the different parties say is not easy.

Schumacher’s manager Sabine Kehm (Bild), suggests Michael had opportunities with Mercedes and “could have been able to sign if he had wanted to earlier in the summer.” So, we are led to believe it is Schumacher’s indecision over whether he wishes to continue driving at all that has forced Mercedes hand in taking advantage of the Hamilton opportunity.

This may have been the case in the end. Michael’s maybe have been holding out for a 2 year deal instead of the 1 year deal Mercedes had on offer and it is this prevarication that has cost him the seat within the team he has been helping to build. But that does not mean he feels he is done with driving in F1.

Strangely there has been no talk of an offer for Michael to join Mercedes management team and they have already made the slightly inexplicable appointment of Niki Lauda last week to the board. It appears as though there is no room at the Mercedes table for the man who has surely helped build this team since Mercedes acquisition.

Suddenly in 2012, he is the fastest driver in Monaco qualifying and has out qualified Rosberg in 8/14 race weekends. He has only finished 7 races, but in 6 of those he finished ahead of Rosberg (Bahrain being the exception). His average time behind the pole time is (0.936 secs) against NR (1.145secs) and he has also qualified on average 7th and Rosberg has managed 8th.

So without a couple of crashes and some poor pit work meaning a lost tyre and without the numerous gearbox failures, Schumacher would be close if not ahead of Rosberg in the championship and that would be a big story.

Suggesting that Michael may want to retire again would have been more credible after year 2 of his comeback when he clearly struggled get to grips with the driving style required to maximise the off throttle engine blowing that dominated car design. But now?

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Hamilton: The tipping point for Whitmarsh

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It appears Martin Whitmarsh days may be numbered as Team Principle of McLaren Racing.

First a brief background of Martin and McLaren: He studied at Portsmouth Polytechnic attaining a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He joined British Aerospace and in his 9 years there, he had been promoted to Head of Manufacturing for the Hawk and Harrier airframes having a specialism in advanced composite materials.

He joined McLaren in 1989 as Head of Operations. On March 1st 2009, he assumed the role Head of McLaren Racing, when Ron Dennis stepped down to concentrate on developing McLaren automotive, the road car division.

Each of the 3 previous years under Whitmarsh, McLaren have trailed home Red Bull in the constructor’s championship. And whilst having built a reputation for being the best team during the season to advance their F1 car development, have also failed to deliver a World Driver’s Title in this period.

Whitmarsh clearly set his stall out to retain Lewis as a driver for the team at all costs to himself, but it seems obvious that he on Dennis were not on the same page (link to prev article). The whole twittergate and telemetry saga was quite ridiculous. I’m all for freedom in the social media of F1 personnel and with regards to the previous “WTF?” Lewis tweet – who cares?

The telemetry tweet was a completely different matter, a most serious breach of conduct imaginable. Lewis was criticising his own teams’ judgement call in public as well as embarrassing he whole team by publishing confidential internal documents. Ask any one of the senior team members how much they enjoyed the flood of fun poking taking texts they received from t other teams following Lewis’ action.

Yet Whitmarsh took no action. All we had was a slightly embarrassed, “we asked him to take that one down” comment and nothing else. No reprimand, no fine and I don’t think we even heard Lewis apologise in public for the very public embarrassment he caused.

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Ferrari in for Lewis Hamilton

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Ok. This may seem a bit out there, but I’ve heard a couple of whispers tonight that Ferrari and Lewis are having a conversation.

This of course goes against how we believe Ferrari operates. They predominantly [not always] have had a number 1 and number 2 driver and clearly Lewis would never accept being a number 2 to Fernando. So would Ferrari change their historic approach and have (at the start of the season at least) 2 equal drivers?

On the con side of the debate, McLaren and Lewis are still making noises about staying together, but they are starting to sound like a couple whose relationship has run stale and are about to break up. Really, it’s not that hard to agree terms that have publicly been on the table for many weeks – and we were led to believe by Lewis this would all be dealt with and put to bed during the Summer break.

So the fact that McLaren and Lewis have not yet done the deal adds credence to the view that they are too far apart in negotiations to get over the line. I’ve pointed out in earlier articles how aggressive McLaren and Ron Dennis have been in staking out the ground that Lewis is going to have to take a pay cut. It’s feels like it’s become too personal.

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