Sid Watkins

#F1 Daily News and Comment: Tuesday 20th January 2015

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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 Previously on TheJudge13: #TJ13 #F1 Courtroom Podcast: … Read more

On This Day in #F1: 20 January

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Brought to you by TheJudge13 chronicler Carlo Carluccio – 2005 F1’s unsung hero – Professor Sid Watkins retires Bernie Ecclestone is losing his power within the incestuous world of Formula One; that’s a given. At 83 years of age, he should be assigned a bed with water-proof layers in a secure institution. There is no … Read more

On this day in #F1: 27th October

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Brought to you by TheJudge13 chronicler Carlo Carluccio. 27/10/63 – Jim Clark equals Fangio’s record. Jim Clark set two records on his way to claiming his first World Championship in 1963. He beat the 6 wins in a season that Fangio had recorded in 1954 and became the first driver in history to win the … Read more

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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2013 Mercedes: To race or not to race?

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I am going to be otherwise engaged after today until after the weekend, but there are a few stories knocking around today, so we’ll have a brief look at a few of them.

Mercedes pulling out of F1?

Today a number of German publications have been carrying the “Mercedes pulling out of F1” story, in particular Auto motor und sport. Mercedes have consistently refused to sign the new Concorde agreement with Ecclestone’s FOM to commit to the sport until 2020.

It appears that earlier this year, Mercedes were not happy with the proposed slice of money they’ve been offered which has prevented them from entering into the Concorde agreement. Since then there have been rumours that the main board of the German car manufacturer wish to distance themselves from association with Bernie Ecclestone following his alleged involvement in the bribery scandal that has seen a German banker Gerhard Gribkowsky sent to jail for nearly 9 years.

Then Mercedes announce today they will not decide on Schumacher’s future until October. This is significant because the he deadline for teams to register their 2013 entry is now 30th September 2012 and there is speculation Mercedes will not meet the deadline.

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Hello world!

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It’s a rather sad and poignant day to launch my blog. Yet it is a day that demonstrates the awesome power of social media. This incredible power is to communicate to the world, or certainly those connected through social media across the world, news and information within seconds of it happening.

This was evident today when one of the renown F1 journalists tweeted this morning, “so sad to wake and hear about Sid…” of course referring to the death of Professor Sid Watkins. The first tweet I saw regarding Sid’s death was around 21:00 last night. It used to be the case that we the public would only hear about breaking news quite some time following the event. So for millions of F1 fans to have known that Sid had passed on to join Ayrton before a number of people closely connected with the F1 circus – would have been impossible a mere handful of years ago.

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