Tag Archives: fia

Alonso vs. Sauber in fairness

In Australia Sauber’s cars crossed the line in seventh and eight places, they were then disqualified because of a technical infringement on the car. A (supposedly) non performance critical part was a few millimetres outside the allowed margin, Sauber sucked it up, said they were wrong, improved their process and got on with their lives. Ferrari weren’t punished at all for the malfunction on Alonso’s DRS in China.
So what is different about the two cases and why were Sauber punished and not Ferrari? If Sauber are to be believed then their infringement wasn’t a performance gain whereas Ferrari’s most certainly could have been so that argument is moot given that Alonso wasn’t punished. Could it have been the pure infringement of the rules that caused Sauber’s penalty? Well Ferrari’s DRS system was clearly active in an area of the track where it shouldn’t have been and so directly contravened the [...]

Red Bull set for Audi tie up?

2010 Constructors champions Red Bull Racing looks set to agree a deal with Audi to use their engines in Formula 1 in 2013. This follows months of speculation in which the German manufacturer was also linked to Williams F1.
Road car innovation
Audi’s parent company VW is believed to have been enticed to finally enter F1 following moves by the sports governing body, the FIA, to make the sport both more environmentally friendly and road car relevant. These two things are not mutually exclusive with road car companies becoming increasingly preoccupied with reducing the fuel consumption of their vehicles in light of ever increasing fuel prices. Many of the sports key players realised that the sports negligence to address these issues in the past couple of years had played a big part in the withdrawal of key players BMW, Honda and Toyota.
It was therefore announced that engines would be downsized from the [...]

Will Porsche return to F1 with Williams?

The Mexican grand prix in 1991 was the last time that a Porsche powered F1 car raced. In the hands of Michele Alboreto and Alex Caffi, the Footwork Porsche cars failed to qualify for most races and when they did make the start the cars wouldn’t last long before suffering reliability gremlins. It was an unfitting end to the German manufacturer tenure in the sport, with them having won three world championships in the 1980s with Mclaren. However, Porsche may be about to put all of this right.
The appeal of F1
Formula One is still massively popular, with Formula One Management suggesting that a global audience of about 600 million people see at least some F1 action every single year. It’s appeal is universal and it has made global megastars out of the likes of Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso. Nigel Mansell can still make money from his association [...]

Briatore and Symonds could be back in F1 for 2013 as the FIA drop appeal

The FIA has dropped it’s appeal against a French court ruling that it’s punishment of Flavio Britore and Pat Symonds formerly of Renault. This whole saga seems to be based around an apology from the pair that means they now acknowledge their part in the scandal following on from the Singapore race fixing.
Their actual punishment now means that they can’t take part in any FIA competition until the end of the 2011 season and any F1 involvement until 2013. Apart from the fact that no F1 of any significance would want to hire these two after what has happened it remains to be seen what 4 years out from the sport would mean for an engineer/manager. Geoff Willis has already been commenting on the state of the HRT Cosworth car that was built by people outside of the paddock so would a four year exile have the same effect [...]