Living the F1 dream
Posted on 30/03/2010
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Alex Snell is spending the 2010 season living the F1 fans’ dream by travelling to every race, clocking, by his own calculations, around 107,000kms doing so.
Thirty-year-old Snell is documenting his exploits on his travel blog. In his introduction he writes: “I'm an ordinary guy who happens to be a big F1 fan. This year though, I won't be watching the Grand Prix from the well-worn comfort of my lazy-boy. Nope, I'll be at the circuit. In fact I'll be at all of the circuits, for every race, for every session, and for every lap.”
Snell has been saving for several years to afford his year’s holiday. His posts contain insights which escape the usual day-to-day coverage and so are worth a read. Take his last update from Australia …
“As soon as the race came to an end the gates onto the circuit were opened & I bolted, as did everyone else. Some were stopping to pick up bits of rubber from the track, others to stand on the finish line, or the grid slots, some just didn't have a clue and found themselves caught by the surging tide of bodies! I however followed the majority and went for a quick sprint up the main straight.”
Hamilton officially labelled a 'dickhead'
Posted on 30/03/2010
Lewis Hamilton’s disappointing weekend in Melbourne came to a head on Monday when he was labelled a dickhead by Tim Pallas, the Victoria roads minister.
Hamilton was charged with improper use of a motor vehicle after he was caught fish-tailing in a Mercedes road car near the Albert Park circuit on Friday. His weekend got no better as he finished sixth in the Australian Grand Prix, having been shunted off the track by Mark Webber.
The McLaren driver’s hopes of putting the weekend behind him were dashed when Pallas, on the day Victoria launched a new road-safety campaign called "Don't be a dickhead ", called Hamilton a dickhead .
“Well, he is certainly a very silly young man, I think, quite frankly,” Pallas said in an interview with 3AW.
Host Neil Mitchell asked him again whether Hamilton was a dickhead. “Well, yes, OK, I'll say it, yes, he's a dickhead,” Pallas said.
Schumacher gets jiggy
Posted on 29/03/2010
Michael Schumacher might have had a bad weekend in Australian but that didn’t stop the old boy staying at Melbourne nightclub Boutique until 6.30am on Monday. Although the club shut at 3.00am, the Herald Sun reported he chatted with patrons until the sun was up.
"The VIP back bar was seriously going off until 6.30am when Schumacher left," a source said. "Schumacher was up on a sofa dancing around and punching the air with his fists. It was legendary stuff. He was drinking water and had a security guy with him."
Come time to leave, Schumacher found his driver had given up and gone home, so the club’s owner lent him his Bentley to get back to his hotel.
If they ruled the world ...
Posted on 26/03/2010
 Mark Webber - no lunkhead |
A light-hearted media release from Red Bull with changes if the sport was ruled by driver-managers
1. The working day would start by the pool, on a sun lounger, chatting on your phone/enormous pda/ghetto blaster while soaking up a few rays.
2. There’d be no annoying practice sessions as these interfere with talking on your mobile
phone/enormous pda/microwave oven.
3. With no practices sessions, lunch would start early at say… hell, let’s call in brunch at 11am, extending until 3pm – enough time to call your ‘broker’ (AKA your mistress) on your mobile phone/enormous pda/flatscreen TV.
4. Saturday mornings would be given over to comparing briefcases and their ability to store a copy of the local daily newspaper (you pretend to be fluent in seven languages, but actually only speak Italian and five unrepeatable words of Portuguese your mistress taught you).
5. Saturday afternoons would be reserved for defending your lunkhead driver from accusation of congenital idiocy after he drove into the back of the Championship leader on his final flying lap.
6. Saturday evening is for persuading your driver that it’s good for him to sew the patches of his new personal sponsors Laxaflo diuretics onto his race suit as you’re too busy sourcing potentially lucrative sponsor for him to leech off (AKA having dinner with your mistress).
7. While the non-televised part of the weekend is for slouching around in jeans and t-shirts, Sunday is for dressing up! So drag out those crocodile-skin shoes, starch up the metre-high collar of your glacially white shirt (all the better to show of your year-round tan) and work those enormous sunglasses by a Russian designer no-one knows but who might soon sponsor your lunkhead driver.
8. Monday is for lounging by the pool, working on that tan, chatting on your mobile phone/enormous pda/spin dryer.
9. Tuesday is for finding out where your lunkhead driver is, so he can drive you to the airport.
10. Wednesday… hey it’s a back-to-back, time to hit the sun lounger again. Don’t forget your mobile phone/enormous pda/Bluray player.
Moss buys million dollar Porsche
Posted on 25/03/2010
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Safety first in Melbourne
Posted on 24/03/2010
All Formula One cars will carry branding of the FIA’s ‘Make Roads Safe’ campaign from this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix. The Formula One Teams’ Association is hoping the added exposure will help the road safety campaign raise awareness of improving road safety
throughout the world.
Rosberg on a roll
Posted on 23/03/2010
Nico Rosberg got his Australian Grand Prix weekend off to a winning start at the Melbourne Crown Casino. On arrival in the city, the Mercedes driver tried to check into his room in the casino's hotel only to find that it wasn't ready. Bored of waiting around, he took about $100 downstairs to the poker tables and emerged a few hours later with $800 in his pocket. Rosberg has past form playing cards and took part in an exclusive pre-race poker game at the German Grand Prix alongside Robert Kubica, Michael Schumacher and Bernie Ecclestone. Whether his luck on the table will be an omen for this weekend’s grand prix remains to be seen.
Another, slightly presumptuous, omen ahead of the Melbourne race was the circuit officials’ decision to name a grandstand after home hero Mark Webber. Almost all the other stands are named after world champions, with the names Schumacher and Fangio adorning the seating areas either side of the new Webber grandstand. Webber is a title contender this year but Albert Park may have just jumped the gun by listing him alongside other antipodean greats such as Jack Brabham and Alan Jones.
Hamilton backs dancing Scherzinger
Posted on 23/03/2010
While the great and the good of the F1 world were en route to Australia, Lewis Hamilton was in the USA to support his girlfriend, Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, as she debuted on Dancing With The Stars.
Nicole and her partner Derek Hough – who was close to Cheryl Cole in the days after her split from Ashley - scored the first two 9s and a 7 on the premiere of the 10th season of the show, beating off stiff competition from the new cast.
Bruno Tonioli called the pair’s Viennese Waltz a “performance of startling finesse” but senior judge Len Goodman was less impressed, saying “there was no footwork”.
Hamilton and Scherzinger reunited after a public split earlier this year.
A dish best served cold?
Posted on 22/03/2010
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Michael Schumacher will be hoping Damon Hill is not a man who holds a grudge after it was revealed Hill will be a steward in two grands prix this year.
Hill’s appointment is part of an FIA initiative to have former drivers act as stewards after years of moaning the officials were out of touch with the sport.
But in 1994 Schumacher cynically took Hill out in the last race of the season to ensure he took the drivers’ title. He must be concerned if he is hauled in front of Hill, that will be at the back of his mind.
Schumacher the fans' No. 1
Posted on 22/03/2010
The first results of the latest F1 fan survey have shown Michael Schumacher as the best-known driver with 19.5% of the vote. Next best was Fernando Alonso with 9.7 per cent, followed by Kimi Raikkonen, even though the Finn has switched for 2010 to world rallying. Around 90,000 fans are believed to have taken part in the FOTA-backed survey.
US F1 rewrites history
Posted on 19/03/2010
While most people understandably assume US F1 will be little more than an embarrassing footnote in F1 history, it seems there is life in the team yet. This week the US F1 website has been updated. However, anyone expecting news about future plans, ambitions for 2011 etc will be disappointed. The only changes are to airbrush Jose Maria Lopez out of existence. Glad its priorities are still in order.
Kovalainen's wild itinerary
Posted on 19/03/2010
Heikki Kovalainen has been clocking up plenty of miles in the short lull between the Bahrain and Australian grands prix.
While Mark Webber headed straight from the Sakhir season opener to Melbourne, Lotus driver Kovalainen returned home to Switzerland. He then flew to his native Finland for a day to announce a new personal sponsor, and on the way home stopped in Geneva to watch an ice-hockey game. His next move is the long haul to Australia.
"I've done it for many years and had the same routine on the other side," he is quoted as saying by Turun Sanomat. "I've never had any major problems with it," he added, referring to jetlag. And he wrote on Twitter early on Friday morning: "Up early again, trying to adapt to Aussie time already. Normal procedure for me, helps a lot adapting to their time."
Finally ... good news for Briatore
Posted on 19/03/2010
Flavio Briatore's first son has been born and named Falco Nathan, according to the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport. The 59-year-old Italian, who recently ruled out returning to formula one despite overturning his lifetime ban for the Singapore race-fixing scandal, was reportedly present for the birth at 8am in Nice.
Falco weighs a healthy 4.1kg, and Briatore's 30-year-old wife Elisabetta Gregoraci, a wonder-bra model, is reportedly also well. It is Briatore's second child, the first being a five-year-old girl called Leni whose mother is the supermodel Heidi Klum. In 2009 Leni was adopted by Klum's husband Seal, the British musician.
Chip off the old block
Posted on 16/03/2010
 Emerson Fittipaldi drives his 1972 Lotus 72D |
Emerson Fittipaldi was in Bahrain to celebrate 60 years of F1, and treated GP Week to brunch. His latest project: preparing his grandson for NASCAR. Pietro, 13, is already a champion karter and is entering the junior NASCAR category.
“I put him in my Corvette around Homestead, so he can get used to a big car,” said Emo who, like Bono, sleeps with his shades on. “ He had to sit on a pillow because he was under the dashboard. God knows how far he’ll go. Kids need to want to do it. If I feel he’s not motivated, I will back off completely.”
Villeneuve impresses BBC
Posted on 16/03/2010
Jacques Villeneuve must have booked his flight before he heard of Stefan GPs fate. Still, Serbia’s loss was Britain’s gain – Jacques picked up a radio mike for BBC Radio 5 Live: “He was good,” commentator David Croft told GP Week. “He’d never done any radio before, and concentrating for an hour-and-three-quarters on a race that boring and finding something interesting to say is no easy task. Ant [Davidson] is going to miss a few races this year, and we’d be delighted to have JV back. If he’s got nothing to do in Canada, ideal.”
A 'bullshit rule'
Posted on 16/03/2010
Driver physios were instructed not to step onto the grid on Sunday because there were too many guests. With royalty on all sides (some Arab, some Hollywood), space was
saved by expelling the trainers to their garages.
Some drivers weren’t happy and, in protest, left their cars after the installation lap and headed back to the pits.
Mark Webber was far from impressed. “It's a typical bullshit rule,” he said. “We had the King of Spain with 5,000 security guards and I can't have a physio.”
Lights, cameras, cars
Posted on 12/03/2010
An officially-sanctioned Formula 1 film will be released early next year. It will be an action documentary charting the history of the sport but focusing especially on the period between 1968 and 1982. The project has the backing of Bernie Ecclestone.
“My partners and I really believe that documentaries can be entertaining and engaging, not just reporting facts," Oscar-winning writer Mark Monro told Autosport. "We want to make a big action movie, do something that puts people in the car and makes them gasp at the speed of the thing. Then, tell the human stories all the while, so you can dip in and out of these human stories with these big action moments that are enhanced from archive footage.
"We have to hit the right tone so the proper fans don't think it is a rubbish, but also make it broad enough so that someone who doesn't know anything about the sport can really enjoy it.”
“It’s a tough order to make a dramatic film about a dramatic sport," producer Michael Shevloff told Autosport. "To make a film and say we will spend US$100 million US$200 million dollars on this movie … well Bernie would just reply and say the teams spend a billion dollars on the sport. So I don't know how you would make it bigger than it is."
The one certainty is that the film does not yet have a title.
Bahrain Grand Prix - The calm before the storm
Posted on 11/03/2010
The first press conference of the season got underway in Bahrain on Thursday and, despite the competition at the front being fierce, the drivers appeared to be exceptionally chummy. The four world champions – Jenson Button, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher - posed for a photo prior to the press grilling, with Alonso standing on tip toes to equal the height of Schumacher and Button. It was all smiles and laughter between the foursome, leading press conference MC Bob Constandurous to quip: “I hope you are all still this friendly at the end of the season!”
During the questioning, Button and Hamilton were chatting and giggling like schoolboys in the back row. When asked if this showed their new friendship, Button joked that they had been told to act like this by McLaren PR man Steve Cooper. Hamilton said they were just practicing for new careers in acting.
Bahrain Grand Prix - Schumacher leaves it late
Posted on 11/03/2010
Michael Schumacher was among the last drivers to arrive in Bahrain ahead of the 2010 season opener. While most of his 23 track rivals were already at the Sakhir circuit on Wednesday afternoon, the 41-year-old German was just touching down in a private jet with his wife Corinna.
His first engagement of the weekend is a breakfast meeting with the press on Thursday.
According to the seven time world champion, however, Bernie Ecclestone will not mind his late arrival. Schumacher told the German magazine Stern that the F1 chief executive would have seen "dollar signs in his eyes" when he heard about his decision to return to F1 this year with Mercedes.
Also missing in Bahrain on Wednesday was Jenson Button, in nearby Abu Dhabi to receive his Laureus Breakthrough award, while Brawn GP - now Mercedes - took the team prize.
"I like that. Thirty years old and I'm a breakthrough sportsman," Button grinned.
Bahrain Grand Prix - HRT goes AWOL?
Posted on 11/03/2010
 HRT's garage doors remained shut on Wednesday |
One notable anomaly in the Bahrain pit lane on Wednesday was that HRT's garage doors remained uniquely closed. The situation coincided with rumours that Bruno Senna and Karun Chandhok's cars had yet to arrive at the Sakhir circuit.
"We only knew we were going to Bahrain on Saturday when the car was loaded with half an hour to spare," Senna admitted to reporters. He said the schedule for Friday's 180 hours of free practice is essentially a shakedown for the two cars, with set-up work to not take place until the day of qualifying.
Also noticed in pit-lane was that Ferrari has revived what it describes as a "more sophisticated and safer" pit-stop traffic light system for 2010.
1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve was hoping to have been racing this weekend with Stefan GP, but instead he will commentate with the British radio broadcaster BBC.
Kazuki Nakajima was also lined up to race for Stefan, and he said on his website that his future plans are now "unclear".
Meanwhile, it is rumoured that Red Bull has made an application to the FIA for its Renault engine to be upgraded in order to come closer to the performance development of the leading Mercedes.
And British visitors to Bahrain have been warned about their safety, following demonstrations in the wake of a meeting between the British ambassador and the radical opposition party al-Wifaq.
Kubica misses his flights
Posted on 10/03/2010
As the F1 world arrives in Bahrain, one driver will be a little late - Robert Kubica missed his flight. As a result he faced a less than direct journey to Bahrain, via Florence and then Dubai, leaving him with the slight issue of how to complete the trip. Asked how he would get to Bahrain from Dubai he just grinned and answered: "No idea".
'He hasn't got his head up his own arse'
Posted on 08/03/2010
Tamara Ecclestone, daughter of F1 supremo Bernie, showed a marked lack of tact in an interview with London giveaway Metro.
Revealing she had just ditched her role with Sky Italia as an F1 reporter, a job entirely unconnected with her father’s position in the sport, Ms Ecclestone said; “I just don't really want to work in Formula One anymore. F1 was a safety net. I did quite enjoy it, but I've got a few lifestyle projects in the pipeline, and a few more modeling bits and endorsements and stuff."
Asked who she would like to win this season’s F1 championship, she said: “I'd really like to see Sebastian Vettel win, because he hasn't got his head up his own arse, unlike others mentioned previously.”
And Jenson Button who she once interviewed only to be interrupted mid flow when he answered his mobile? “I think he was really rude. And I also don't think he deserved to be world champion. There, I said it.”
Vettel's love affair with 'Luscious Liz'
Posted on 08/03/2010
 Sebastian Vettel has a very special relationship with his cars |
Sebastian Vettel has continued in the slightly bizarre tradition of giving his cars feisty female names, by calling his latest Red Bull ‘Luscious Liz’.
Last year Vettel called the updated RB5 'Kate's Dirty Sister' after it proved to be quicker and more aggressive than its predecessor 'Kate'. The female name is always emblazoned on the dashboard of the car and is just one of his several F1-related superstitions. He religiously steps into his cars and dismounts from the left-hand side, and always slides a lucky coin behind the laces of his boot.
F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone is a big fan of Vettel, rituals and all, and recently said: "If I could design a superstar, Sebastian would be the result. He is exactly what Formula One needs: a young, super-talented driver who is intelligent but not arrogant, popular with the public and good with the media, normal but still very professional."
Vettel will next be putting ‘Luscious Liz’ through her paces on Friday, at the first free practice session of the season in Bahrain.
Button turns cabbie
Posted on 05/03/2010
Jenson Button switched his McLaren for a black cab for an upcoming TV advert. His first passengers were boy band JLS, who he took to Sandwich in Kent as part of a promotion for crisps.
“It's not every day that you meet a Formula One world champion,” said Jonathan 'JB' Gill. “ It's nice to put a face to the name. We have seen him on TV and watched Formula One ourselves, so to meet him was fantastic.
“He gave us a couple of autographs and we gave him some too, so everyone was happy.”
Button took well to his new role. ''It's a very hectic day but it's fun. I'm not used to doing stuff like this so it's new to me in a way and something different for me,'' he said. ''It's a bit nerve-racking, as I'm not really an actor.''
Liverpool F1
Posted on 03/03/2010
 The Liverpool ONE shopping centre where the “Pageant of Power” will take place |
The property developer which built Liverpool’s ONE shopping centre, plans to celebrate the building’s second birthday by running F1 cars through the city’s streets.
The event, which will take place on May 25 – the Tuesday before the Turkish Grand Prix – is being billed as the "Liverpool Pageant of Power". The event will also feature displays of motorbikes, classic cars and dragsters, as well as an air show.
Event director James Hall said: "It will be an evening event and there is a blueprint from the Tall Ships and other events that shows this can be done with minimal disruption to traffic and the working of the city. All the shops and restaurants will be open and we are confident that it will be a nice, safe and friendly environment for families to come and enjoy."
Ferrari launches F1 inspired ‘green’ sports car
Posted on 02/03/2010
 The Ferrari HY-KERS concept car was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show |
Ferrari has launched a new prototype sports car using the Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) developed in the 2009 F1 car. Although the technology is being showcased in a prototype 599, Ferrari hopes that the system will be available in all its cars by 2015.
The petrol-electric sports car is a hybrid vehicle which can switch between zero-emissions electric power, petrol power, or a mix of the two, cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and boosting fuel consumption.
A spokesman said: “Ferrari has also applied its F1 technology to the design, engineering and construction of a new kind of electric motor which also helps optimise the dynamics of the car.”
The company claims that the HY-KERS prototype maintains the high-performance characteristics typical of a Ferrari while, at the same time, reducing CO2 emissions by 35%. The 200mph vehicle will not be available until 2014, and it will cost an estimated £300,000.
- Autosport editor in hot water with Team Lotus
- McLaren email gaffe irritates media
- Massa's captain crashes his boat
- Battered Bernie appears in watch advert
- Mercedes top of the stops
- Webber tops Aussie sports earners list
- Button surprised by 'random' video clip
- Ecclestone takes a 'good whacking'
- Petrov reveals Alonso fans defaced website
- 'I just don't give a f***' - Foul-mouthed Hamilton on Twitter