Bits and bobs from the F1 world

There were some interesting rumours kicking about the paddock in Valencia, one of which was that the Carabante Family wants to take control of the HRT team and is planning to promote Geoff Willis to be team principal and Gary Savage to be technical director. Well, that is the story in the Spanish press. The truth is a bit different. It is clear that Kolles’s patience with the Spanish owners has run out. The problem is that they only own the entry and do not have a team as such. This is leased from Kolles, who has all the equipment and all the contracts of those involved. Thus Kolles can leave the team tomorrow but it would be difficult for the team to show up in Britain unless all the bills are paid and they can claim the cars as their own. They would have to find a racing team to run the operation as they have nothing beyond a marketing office in Madrid. The other problem that the Carabantes must face is that they owe the Banco Popular rather a lot of money and there has been talk for more than a month that the bank may step in and take over the team – or at least the entry – and then do a deal with Kolles. There was a rumour that Kolles would be moving to Williams.

“Absolute rubbish,” said Kolles. “That is not going to happen.”

There may be some truth in the stories that Kolles may no longer want to be involved with the nominally-Spanish team, although he is not about to admit such things. Kolles would be happy to buy the entry from the Carabantes if he had the money and they wanted to sell. The first concept may be possible, but the Carabantes do not want to sell. Kolles’s crew is based in Greding, in Bavaria and he argues that this is not really a problem as today teams can have very different structures to previous years, with much work being sub-contracted. At the moment, for example, both Ferrari and McLaren are working in the former Toyota windtunnels near Cologne in Germany and there are rumours that Red Bull has been doing some aerodynamic development work at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, in Teddington, Middlesex, a facility that was used for many years by McLaren. It is possible that Kolles might be able to use the team he has created by getting hold of an entry from another team in trouble (there are several) but he does not want another facility. Ironically, if he were to do this, he might be able to sell the extra facility to the Carabantes and/or the Banco Popular. The only person with an F1 standard factory in Spain is Joan Villadelprat, of Epsilon Euskadi.

Elsewhere, down at Team Lotus there were some interesting visitors at the weekend in Spain with Angola’s Vice-Minister of Sport Albino da Conceição José being spotted on the grid along with Zenu dos Santos, the son of the country’s president. This will only add to the rumours that the team is in the process of trying to do a deal with Angola’s national oil company Sonangol. It should be noted that former Malaysian PM Dr Mahathir Mohamad recently complimented Tony Fernandes on his success with AirAsia (an important hint given that Mahathir was a big supporter of the Dany Bahar takeover of Group Lotus). Mahathir added that the Malaysian economy needs to have direct air links to Africa in order to create economic growth. Sonangol runs its own airline called Sonair.

Down at Williams the team has now announced that it has hired (or rather re-hired) Jason Somerville to be its Head of Aerodynamics. He originally joined the team in 1997 as the aerodynamicist responsible for the design and development of the BMW sports car that won the Le Mans 24 Hours for the team. He switched to F1 and worked on various cars being promoted to joint head of the department before being hired by Toyota in 2003. At the end of 2009 he joined Renault and is the latest in a series of Renault engineers heading for the door marked “Exit” down at Enstone.

He will be joined at Williams in October by Professor Mark Gillan, who will be Chief Operations Engineer. His career in F1 started in 1998 when he was hired by McLaren after completing a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering from Queen’s University of Belfast, a period spent with the Short Brothers and then three years as a lecturer at Queen’s. He spent four years at McLaren before joining Jaguar Racing in 2002 but then took up a professorship at the University of Surrey before moving to the Toyota F1 Team as Head of Aerodynamics. He later returned to the University of Surrey as Professor of Vehicle Engineering.

Oh yes, and the word is that Sam Michael my be going back to his old team at Silverstone. It is always possible that the Australian was visiting Vijay Mallya’s very large boat to have a cup of tea, but it is probably more likely that he was discussing future employment.