Since I have been gone…

The world never really stops moving for a modern F1 journalist, but I kept the work to a minimum and managed to have a very pleasant summer pause on Cape Cod. I’ve been to a lot of places in my life, but Cape Cod is certainly up there with the best of them. One can have too much of a good thing and doing more than 20 Formula 1 races in a year is not a good idea, in my opinion. It is better to maintain the exclusivity as this keeps the price nice and high.

I was reminded of this concept when I heard about the fate of lobster fishermen up and down the eastern seaboard. At the moment the price of the crunchy crustaceans has plummeted to less than $3 a pound, the lowest level it has been for 20 years. This is because of an over-abundance of the creepy-crawlies in the Atlantic, which researcher types believe is due to the reduction in the number of natural predators of the lobster. Overpopulation has also led to the first known instances of lobster cannibalism in the wild, as there is not enough lobster nosh (whatever that may be) to go around.

The price has fallen so much that fisherman now say that it costs them more to go lobster-potting than it does to stay in port. I felt it was my duty to eat as many lobsters as possible. In fact, I’m a little lobstered-out at the moment.

Anyway, the F1 world has been pretty quiet. Even Bernie Ecclestone went on holiday and so the only news that has been available has been that created by the F1 websites, as the sport itself has been doing nothing at all. There has been a lot of idle chatter about Dan Ricciardo replacing Mark Webber, and Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen swapping drives. This latter story seems to depend on what happens with the Lotus F1 Team as for some time the proprietors have been working to try to get Renault to increase its involvement in the team. This is entirely logical as the French car manufacturer has lost a massive amount of visibility in F1 since it stopped being a team owner, after the embarrassing Singapore Scandal back in 2009. Renault grabbed a parachute and left the team in the hands of Gerard Lopez and Eric Lux. The problem with that move was that despite winning a string of championships with Red Bull Racing, Renault has had very little publicity. The Red Bulls are smothered in Infiniti badging and the average man on the street does not know, nor care, that the winning engines are from Viry-Chatillon. If it is says Infiniti all over the car it is logical to assume that the engines were probably made in Japan.

The result of this is that Renault is now looking for ways to get a better return on its overall investment in F1. Leaving out the smaller teams that use Renault engines, the only logical choice is for Renault to concentrate its involvement on Lotus F1 Team, which has been doing remarkably well, despite endless rumours about the team’s finances. Renault could gain a lot more publicity if it reorganised its spending and bought the Lotus side pods. Raikkonen is waiting to see if that happens, and talking to Ferrari looks to me like part of the negotiating process. But you never know, maybe Alonso is also watching to see if that happens because he is getting bored with Ferraris that are not quite good enough.

Still, Alonso should perhaps look at Ferrari’s financial results for the first six months of the year. The company had pre-tax profits of $235 million, up 22 percent compared to last year. It also has $1.6 billion in the bank. Oddly, Britain has now overtaken Germany as Ferrari’s biggest market outside the United States and remains ahead of Chinese sales. The Middle East continues to grow.

Elsewhere, there is talk (again) that Silverstone has finally sorted out some kind of lease deal, with persons unknown. This is about the fourth time we have heard that rumour but the clock is definitely ticking for the British Racing Drivers’ Club, which needs to sort something out by next Spring to avoid its bank manager taking over the whole place. The goal is to find the cash to pay off the club’s $45 million of debts incurred as a result of building The Wing. The plan is for a long-term lease, although the club intends to retain certain privileges. No-one seems to know who is involved but it is probably not Bernie Ecclestone.

His lawyers have not had much of a summer break as they fight on various fronts. The Munich Regional Court has been awaiting a response to the bill of indictment and that will need to be delivered in the next fews days. After that has been done a judge will decide whether to indict Mr E.

Formula E has nothing to do with Bernie but it has done an interesting TV deal with the Fox television network for coverage of its all-electric races. Fox is betting that Formula E will be a big success in the United States with the involvement of Andretti Autosport, races in Miami and Los Angeles and, so rumour has it, a team that will be owned by film star Leonardo DiCaprio, who is a celebrated environmentalist and an investor in the Fisker car company.

One F1 name in America has run into trouble in recent days, Juan Pablo Montoya having been informed that he will not be driving for Earnhardt Ganassi Racing in 2014. This is no great surprise as the former Williams and McLaren driver has won only two races in seven seasons in stock car racing – and the sponsors want more.

There have been two notable deaths in recent weeks: the former Formula 2 entrant John Coombs, who oversaw the careers of many future F1 stars in the 19950s, 1960s and early 1970s, and former BMW Motorsport boss Karl-Heinz Kalbfell, who was the man who was largely responsible for getting BMW back into F1 in 2000. He was killed while racing in a vintage motorcycle event at Brands Hatch – a racer to the end.