Mercedes GP Petronas has been busily sweeping up talent in recent months and has now announced two important new appointments aimed at strengthening the team’s technical structure. Geoff Willis, who has been working for HRT in recent months, has been named as the new Technology Director, while Aldo Costa will join in December as Engineering [...]
Archive for September, 2011
Costa and Willis join Mercedes GP
Posted in F1 people, F1 Teams on September 30, 2011 | 37 Comments »
Calendar questions: who has what rights?
Posted in F1 Teams on September 29, 2011 | 43 Comments »
The Commercial Rights Holder (CRH) draws up the Formula 1 calendar (a point worth mentioning when it comes to Bahrain), and his proposals are approved by the FIA. It is not clear what happens if the FIA objects to the calendar. The CRH has a lot of restrictions on what he can and cannot do. [...]
Calendar questions: Bahrain
Posted in F1 politics on September 29, 2011 | 39 Comments »
There has been talk in recent days about some discontent regarding the most recent F1 calendar issued by the FIA. There are some very serious misgivings (again) over the inclusion of Bahrain – something which is inevitably going to cause problems in the months ahead, as the F1 world dances around the problems of the [...]
A picture of the new McLaren factory!
Posted in F1 Teams on September 29, 2011 | 24 Comments »
Last week I briefly touched on McLaren’s expansion plans in the years ahead, as the company bids to become a multi-billion dollar enterprise. In addition to an expanded racing team, the McLaren Automotive car company and its electronics division, the main thrust of the expansion will come from the McLaren Applied Technologies division, a company [...]
Selling Toro Rosso
Posted in F1 Teams on September 29, 2011 | 24 Comments »
You will read in various places today that Dietrich Mateschitz is telling the world that Scuderia Toro Rosso is NOT for sale. If you follow all these stories back to their source, they all come from the same journalist, who has been selling the same story into different newspapers and reporting it on different websites. [...]
Mallya giving up low-cost airline
Posted in F1 Drivers on September 28, 2011 | 27 Comments »
Vijay Mallya, the boss of Force India, has been in the news a lot in recent days thanks to his troubled Kingfisher Airlines company, which has debts of $1.5 billion. Mallya has just announced that the airline will exit the low-cost sector and try to make money as a premium airline. Kingfisher, which was launched [...]
Formula 1 and rocket science
Posted in F1 Teams on September 28, 2011 | 32 Comments »
There have been some stories in recent days which show that Red Bull has increased its revenues after winning its first World Championship. That is hardly rocket science. Success in F1 pays. Failure is costly. When one looks at the current situation of Williams, which was formerly one of the strongest teams in the business, [...]
A change at UBS
Posted in F1 politics on September 28, 2011 | 6 Comments »
The chatter in Singapore over the weekend was not all about Formula One being in town. The government of Singapore is the biggest shareholder in UBS, the former Union Bank of Switzerland, and the bank was highly visible on advertising hoardings all around the circuit. The bad news is that the bank was also in [...]
Turning the Lotus Renault GP story on its head
Posted in F1 Teams on September 27, 2011 | 51 Comments »
The immediate future of the Lotus brand is about to be settled – and not just in Formula 1. For some months there has been speculation about what will happen with the Lotus Renault GP team with a number of different scenarios being discussed. To begin with one must look back to when Genii Capital, [...]
A second race in the US?
Posted in Circuits on September 27, 2011 | 53 Comments »
I bumped into Bernie Ecclestone in Singapore and we had a chat about some of the matters of the moment: nothing too heavy. We talked a bit about India and getting everything together in time for the GP; we touched on Mexico where he said there are moves going on; and we briefly discussed a [...]
