Jean-Francois Caubet

Renault do a huge U-turn

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A bizarre mentality

thejudge13 reported on October 9th what I considered a rather strange story emanating from Renault. Here’s an excerpt from that day;

“Apparently Renault has said it will not provide any more teams with engines as it has 3 customers already. So Marussia and HRT needn’t bother knocking on the door of the Renault Chateau huh? The reason given by Jean-Francois Caubet, Managing Director of Renault Sport is that – (paraphrased) these 2 teams are rubbish and its bad for Renault’s image.

He tells Ferrari and Mercedes they need to do their fair share and supply 4 teams like Renault does now. This Gallic thinking is seriously flawed, because one would imagine the research and development costs are so high, building a few extra units for a couple more teams would share the cost around better for everyone”.

I then made a few disparaging comments about Jean-Francois and his possible drinking habits. Of course on November 6th, we then reported the ‘retirement’ of Jean-Francois Caubet and the appointment of his successor, Renault Sport’s president Jean-Michel Jalinier. However, Jean-Francois’ departure was overshadowed by the same day appointment of Renault Sport protoge Cyril Abiteboul as Tony Fernandes replacement at Caterham.

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Pic to Caterham, Gutiérrez to Sauber, Heikki out, Alosno $10m WDC win bonus, Dennis conspicuous by absence, FI $80m announcement to shore up confidence, Lewis appears whistful, Mr. E warns Interlagos

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Editor’s note: So much is happening and the driver market has been moving quickly, so since I release the last post GMT 00:00 I am releasing another one to make update’s easier to read.

I’ve added a ‘search bar’ on the right hind side bar…so if you want to find a story easily you can type “Lewis pushed” and all articles with that phrase will be presented in a list.

Also the end of season is iminent. To save you checking thejudge13 daily when there are no new articles why not sign up for an email notification: 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.

Yesterday we met our friends from Malaysia. Today I want to say Hi to those of you from Indonesia who regularly read the site – introduce yourselve’s in the comments. Thank you for reading regularly.

Dominicali: When asked at the FIA conference about the new engines and regulation changes for 2014, he said “we already have a group of small people already working on the project”. I don’t know what to say really. Oompa Lumpa’s – chocolate rivers at Maranello

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American Pensioners buy 9% of F1, German GP Highly doubtful, FIA sack American chief doctor, FOTA forum a JOKE! T Rosso ditch Ferrari, SKY to replace FOM TV, Unser racing family dynasty born

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thejudge13 readers: The power of the internet is amazing, and it has been 9 weeks today since the site first said Hello to the world, they sad day following the death of Sir Sid Watkins. In that time we’ve had visits from 121 countries including places you would never think have even heard of F1 like Bhutan, The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Swaziland and Nepal. Yesterday we had our 40,000th visit –  which I find staggering. Thank you all for supporting the effort that goes into producing this site.

Just to let you know a little about how the blog software I used works, it shows me every location (by country) from where people click on the site – but it gives me NO personal information at all. Even if you register for the email notification when a new article is published, I can’t access the list of people or emails inside the widget that manages this for me.

If you do leave a comment you are asked for an email address, however there is no way of knowing whether this is valid or not – and I can assure you there will be no junk mail sent out from thejudge13. So today I’m saying Hi to the people who will visit from Mauritius (I truly wish I were with you today as its cold and wet in the UK  😎  )  – if you want to just say hello back, please leave a comment at the bottom.

Over the winter there may not be thejudge13 articles every day, and I know many of you land on the home page each day when you visit. This is because thejudge13 is saved in your web browser as a favourite or you just type in http://www.thejudge13 into the URL. To save you clicking and typing each day when nothing is happening, why not register for the email service on the right hand side bar of the page at the top (max 2 articles a day) – or follow @thejudge13 on twitter (again click on the right blue twitter button).

On with the news…

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