This morning in Paris Marussia Racing officially presented Charles Pic to the F1 media, although coming a week after the end of the season, the attendees were largely restricted to the French, as most of the F1 circus is happily at home and not very keen on any further travelling. Pic and team principal John Booth were on hand, along with Pic’s advisor Olivier Panis and his godfather, the man who got him interested in racing, former F1 driver Eric Bernard.
Both Bernard and Panis were sponsored by the Pic Family’s company GCA Trans when they were young drivers (before Charles was born) and Bernard was asked to be one of Charles’s godparents. When Charles was 12 Eric bought his a kart for his birthday and so the Charles Pic racing story began…
Bernard was two years older than Panis and belonged to a talented generation in France that included Jean Alesi and Erik Comas. He beat Alesi (and Bertrand Gachot) to the Volant Elf prize at the end of 1983 and went on to win the French Formula Renault title in 1985. He was then runner-up in French F3 to Alesi in 1987, and in 1989 Alesi, Comas and Bernard finished 1-2-3 in the Formula 3000 Championship and all three went on into Formula 1: Alesi with Tyrrell, Bernard with Larrousse and Comas with Ligier. Bernard scored an outstanding fourth place finish at Silverstone in 1990 but at the end of 1991 the team was struggling for money and Eric suffered leg fractures in a practice crash at the Japanese Grand Prix. 
The injuries forced him to sit out the 1992 and 1993 seasons, but he returned to F1 in 1994 as Panis’s team-mate with Ligier. He finished third at the German GP that year but the team was taken over soon afterwards and a complicated deal ended up with him ending the year with a one-off race for Team Lotus before he was replaced by Mika Salo. Bernard went on to enjoy a good career in sports cars.
Meanwhile in London the Formula One Teams Association (or the survivors at least) got together to try to figure out how to lure Ferrari and Red Bull Racing back into the fold before February when they will officially leave the organisation. FOTA seems to understand that a union of the teams is essential if there is to be any real progress in winning a bigger share of the revenues of the sport – which is the fastest way to increase team budgets, rather than trying to penny-pinch savings with the Resources Restriction Agreement. The big teams, however, want expensive things like testing and fewer restrictions on what they can and cannot spend their money on.
Ferrari and, to a lesser extent, Red Bull Racing say that they want to keep costs down, but they want to do it their way…
joeblogsf1 
Have the teams linked with engine builders, merc, Ferrari etc. been given a special pass on budget and testing to get ready for the new engine formula?
Makes me really angry that Ferrari and Red Bull are damaging the long term interests of the sport, just to further their own interests!
Destroy the only thing that can get more money for everyone. Refuse to agree to reduce spending, because you have lots of money and it hurts your competitors. Demand things that cost more money, so further expand the gulf between the bottom and the top.
Ferrari doesn’t surprise me one bit. I’m sure their ideal scenario would be fake GPs and guaranteed victories, without ever needing to compete.
Red Bull are the ones who I think are disgusting! Not long ago they were total outsiders, and spending restrictions have reined in Ferrari and allowed them to beat them. Now they’re at the top and have lots of money, they don’t want anyone else to be able to do the same! Reminds me of some freedom fighter getting into power as the voice of the people, then just becoming a dictator and refusing to leave…
Every sport that competes more over desks and less in its natural turf is deemed to die, and F1 dies more every season.
Ale Jandro,
I don’t know why you bother…
Good to see and read a little of Bernard, he and Larrousse were among my favourites back in the day! Erik Comas I always thought was potentially excellent too, but never got the car to show it. Good to see a French driver back.
Joe,
Maybe a little off subject, but I guess you have seen in the past how we have a good crop of talented drivers from say France, Germany, Britain, Finland and South America. It seems to go in cycles. Is this to do with say a real top line driver who makes it in a car and team, and that gets the local press /media then interested in F1?
It has been reported about the TV rights in Spain and a certain driver and former team manager, and how a former country watched only motorbike racing, and then switched to F1.
Alex H, you sound like a socialist. In the real world and most other sports, what you describe is how companies and teams compete against each other to win.
The Resources Restriction Agreement was always doomed to failure. I suspect it was only enacted to prevent Mad Max from cooking up his own scheme.
The large teams will never be stopped from spending what they like. I simply do not understand how the small teams miss this. The sooner the small teams give up on the RRA, the sooner they’ll start increasing their own revenue.
I simply don’t understand why anyone is even fighting to retain the RRA. Perhaps the minnows are so renounced by the ideal of equalization promised by the RRA that they can’t bear the reality of its un-enforceability. Technology improvements make enforceability all the more impossible. Wind tunnel and track time is fairly easy to track, but CFD and simulator time is almost impossible to track. Further, the large works teams have so many automotive division, it can be all but impossible to track down which group paid for what.
The small teams need to face these facts and soon, because if FOTA isn’t brought back together, it is the small teams that will suffer the most.