Indholdsfortegnelse for 20/02/20 i Autosport

As happens every year, it seems to take ages before the new Formula 1 launches arrive and then they all come along at once. And this week all the new machines will hit the track at Barcelona for the first test. Ferrari claims it has gone‘extreme’ to address the downforce deficit it has suffered in recent seasons (see page 22), while Mercedes has decided to try a few new paths to give its W11 development potential (p28). Our technical editor Jake Boxall-Legge has been joined by world championship-winning engineer Tim Wright on our F1 team and they cast their eyes over the new challengers in this issue. Look out for more from Wright, including a piece on his illustrious career, in future issues of the magazine and on Autosport.com. We…

INDIANAPOLIS 500 There will be no guaranteed spots in the Indianapolis 500 for full-time IndyCar Series entries, IndyCar and Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Roger Penske announced last Friday. Penske, who originally put forward the controversial idea and gained support from many rival team owners including Chip Ganassi and Michael Andretti, noted the public’s broadly negative response to the notion, and has now scrapped the idea. Instead, the enticement for teams running full-season entries is the increase in prize money available, which sends the overall purse for the Indy 500 from $13million to $15m. Other significant changes for qualifying include the Last Row Shootout contenders being allowed multiple attempts over a 75-minute session, rather than the one-run-and-done featured last year. In order to help counteract the extra weight and drag caused…

WORLD ENDURANCE CHAMPIONSHIP Ferrari has been reinstated as GTE Pro class winner in last November’s Shanghai round of the World Endurance Championship, after the disqualification of James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi was overturned by the International Court of Appeal last week. The Italian manufacturer and the factory AF Corse team successfully argued that the splitter damage that resulted in the #51 Ferrari 488 GTE failing the rideheight test was caused by an incident with another car. They also provided a report from an expert witness stating that the damage, which lowered the car on the left-hand side, could not have offered any aerodynamic advantage. New evidence was provided to the court by Johnny Mowlem, the driver of the AF-run Red River Sport GTE Am-class Ferrari, who said in a…

ASIAN LE MANS SERIES Top British team Carlin could snatch an automatic Le Mans 24 Hours entry after its LMP2 Dallara took its first victory in last weekend’s Asian Le Mans Series round at Sepang. The win, earned by Ben Barnicoat, Harry Tincknell and Jack Manchester, puts the team just nine points adrift of the Aurus-badged G-Drive ORECA in the race for the title – and a Le Mans entry – before this weekend’s finale at Buriram. The race was won on the road by the Eurasia Motorsport Ligier of Roberto Merhi, Aidan Read and Nick Foster, but with five minutes to go the car was called to the pits by race control for repairs to its rear lights. This was not done, and the resulting time penalty elevated the…

Denny Hamlin won the 62nd Daytona 500, but the juxtaposition of him celebrating in the tri-oval grass while injured rival Ryan Newman was tended to by medical crews after somersaulting across the finish line was as stark as the brutality of superspeedway racing sometimes gets. The opening round of the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series came down to a fearsome shootout in overtime, going way beyond the planned 500-mile distance, and finished a day later than scheduled. Toyota’s 2019 Daytona 500 winner Hamlin – who led a race-best 79 laps for Joe Gibbs Racing – was up against a phalanx of Fords, led by 2008 winner Newman and Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney. Blaney pushed Hamlin on the opening lap of the two-lap sprint to the chequered flag. Hamlin blocked Newman’s first…

The demise of Holden – announced last week by parent company General Motors – won’t kill Supercars in Australia. But it will force the series to face its future with a sense of genuine urgency. Even without GM’s decision to axe the Holden name, it’s unlikely that there would have been Holdens racing in Supercars for long. It always felt like the current factory deal, which is supposed to run through to the end of 2021, would be the last one for Holden in its traditional sense. Then, best-case scenario, the out-of-production Commodore would be replaced by a racing Camaro or Corvette – backed by GM. None of that necessarily changes. What the Holden demise has done, however, is make 2022 the hardest of hard deadlines for Supercars. In fact,…

POWERTRAIN As teased by the earlier unveiling of the Haas, Ferrari has opted to showcase its new car with a larger-bore main exhaust with a smaller wastegate mounted atop, and it remains to be seen whether the split-wastegate design seen in practice for the 2019 season-closing Abu Dhabi GP will be trialled again. One of the biggest controversies over Ferrari’s powertrain last season was fuel flow and, while it was never categorically proved that the team was circumventing the regulations, we’ll have to wait and see whether the FIA technical directives drafted at the end of last year will inhibit Ferrari’s top speed and acceleration. MINOR DETAILS The floor does not feature the fins Ferrari ended 2019 with, but it’s not uncommon to see teams holding back parts in their…

CONCEPT For the most part, the W11 is a clear evolution of the W10. It should be remembered that Mercedes, having turned up in week one of testing last year with something that amounted to a beta-spec car, enacted an overhaul of the full aero package. Although technical chief James Allison has explained that the team won’t repeat that, there will be an upgrade package in week two to help the team prepare for the season-opening Australian Grand Prix. As Allison points out on page 28, the team also had to make a few architectural changes to the package to ensure that its development curve could continue. REAR END At the rear, Mercedes has also shown the W11 with a single-element T-wing, with downturned tips to better place the tip…

The transformation of McLaren over the past 12 months has been one of Formula 1’s recent feel-good stories. A fallen giant once blindsided by delusions of grandeur, the team has now become humble and realistic, allowing its recovery to commence. The magnitude of the change was clearer than ever at the launch of the McLaren MCL35 car at its Woking base last week, one day shy of the same event the previous year. When the 2019 car was unveiled, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown was joined on stage by Gil de Ferran, the team’s sporting director. Neither was meant to be running the F1 team day to day, but was tasked with doing so in the absence of a team principal or technical director. New drivers Carlos Sainz and Lando…

FRONT END There’s a tiny detail that earns a few brownie points: Alfa Romeo has shaped the front snorkel to match the grille design typically seen on its road-going vehicles. Ultimately, it probably has no real aerodynamic effect, but it’s quite a cool little feature. The nose nostrils are retained, and the resulting pathway on to a small cape – something Alfa added midway through last year – should add to the overall front-end downforce. The team has also stuck to its guns with the anhedral front-wing design, although the car was shaken down with a full five-element arrangement, similar to the concept used at the end of last season. For most of 2019, the car ran with the top two flaps fused together, but Alfa opted for a more…

While Kalle Rovanpera shone, another Finn was gone – before the opening leg was done. After losing his factory seat with Toyota for 2020, Jari-Matti Lavala couldn’t imagine life without a World Rally Car drive. Rather than sit the year out while he waited for an opportunity, the 34-year-old found the backing to drive a privateer Toyota Yaris WRC on an event he’s won four times in the past, including in 2008 when he became the championship’s youngest winner, aged 22. Although Latvala insisted this wasn’t a win-or-bust outing, he certainly hoped for a lot more alongside new co-driver Juho Hanninen, who’d switched seats for the occasion. He was ninth fastest on Friday’s first stage – his first competitive outing in a World Rally Car since Rally Spain last October…

TOYOTA RACING SERIES MANFEILD (NZL) 15-16 FEBRUARY ROUND 5/5 Igor Fraga snatched the title from under the nose of M2 Competition team-mate Liam Lawson with victory in the final stanza of the 15-race season – the historic New Zealand Grand Prix at the circuit named after late Kiwi hero Chris Amon. Brazilian Fraga, who like Lawson will race in FIA Formula 3 this year, had already won Saturday’s opening race. Poleman Franco Colapinto made a sluggish start, allowing Fraga and 2019 TRS champion Lawson ahead. While Fraga led all the way, Lawson had to focus on defending second from the Kiwi Motorsport car of Colapinto. Caio Collet was fourth, while American Spike Kohlbecker – who raced FF1600 in the UK in 2019 – made a big step forward in form…

HISTORIC HILLCLIMB Great Britain is to have a record representation in the prestigious FIA Hill Climb Masters event at Rampa da Falperra in Portugal, which is set to attract competitors from more than 20 nations over the weekend of 10-11 October. Run in alternate years, the fourth edition will use part of the European Championship hill. “Most of the top 10 Motorsport UK British championship contenders are planning to enter the end-of-season shootout,” said five-time national champion David Grace, vice-president of the FIA Hill Climb Commission. “It’s a spectacular course, very fast but flowing, on the bottom half of the FIA European Championship Hill, and the locals are behind it. In recent years Italians Christian Merli [Osella-Zytek FA30] and Simone Faggioli [Norma-Zytek M20] have made it their own. The challenge…

BRITISH GT Academy Motorsport owner Matt Nicoll-Jones will return to racing in British GT this year, sharing with team regular Will Moore in one of the squad’s newly acquired Ford Mustang GT4s. Nicoll-Jones, the 2008 GT4 champion, last raced alongside Moore in 2018, when they managed a run of four straight podium finishes before two retirements derailed their title aspirations. After a difficult season with the new Aston Martin Vantage GT4 last year, Academy has committed to run the Multimatic-built Mustangs that narrowly missed out on last year’s title with Seb Priaulx and Scott Maxwell. The team has also been appointed as a European agent for the cars. “We’re only doing it to try and win it, that’s the goal,” said Nicoll-Jones, who will also contest the European GT4 series…

FIVE CARS FOR R RACING Ginetta Junior squad R Racing has revealed a five-car line-up for this season. The team was new to the category in 2019 and began the season running just one car, but by the end of the year had expanded to four with eventual runner-up Zak O’Sullivan joining mid-season. Josh Rattican and Joel Pearson – who finished ninth and 10th respectively in last year’s standings – head the 2020 line-up. They will be joined by second-year drivers Bailey Voisin and Freddie Tomlinson, and Winter Series rookie champion Aston Millar. INVICTUS JAGS FOR SALE Two Jaguar F-type SVR GT4s that competed in British GT under the Invictus Games Racing banner will be auctioned this weekend as part of the Silverstone Auctions Race Retro Show. Built by Jaguar’s…

The warm weather that troubled last weekend’s Rally Sweden wasn’t a problem 47 years ago. Instead, studded snow tyres would definitely have come in handy for the 1973 Swedish Rally – the first as part of the newly created World Rally Championship – only for them to be controversially banned for the event. It was Saab’s Stig Blomqvist and Arne Hertz who conquered the Scandinavian snow, despite a lengthy stoppage for a faulty fuel pump. From the start in Karlstad, Blomqvist opened up a healthy lead over Lancia’s Ove Andersson in the opening stages. Per Eklund (Saab), Harry Kallstrom (Lancia) and Hakan Lindberg (Fiat) looked set to be the biggest threats, especially as Blomqvist’s stranglehold on the top of the timings ended on stage eight as his pump issue started…

FORMULA 1 The Chinese Grand Prix has been called off due to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, and concerns are now growing about the inaugural Vietnamese GP planned for the beginning of April. Formula 1 announced last week that it had postponed the Chinese race scheduled for 19 April at the Shanghai International Circuit following a request from the event promoter, having monitored the epidemic in recent weeks. At the time of going to press, over 70,000 cases of coronavirus have been reported in China, causing 1771 deaths. Outside China, over 500 cases have been reported in 30 other countries. “As a result of continued health concerns and with the World Health Organisation declaring the coronavirus as a global health emergency, the FIA and Formula 1 have taken these measures in…

FORMULA 2 Williams Formula 1 reserve driver Jack Aitken has targeted the Formula 2 title after confirming that he will remain with Campos Racing for 2020, while Honda-linked Nobuharu Matsushita has made the same pledge on his move to MP Motorsport for the coming campaign. Aitken (below), who was a protege of the Renault F1 team from 2016-19, finished fifth in the championship with Spanish team Campos last season, with three wins. “We were challenging for wins and the championship throughout the whole season, so that’s what we need to try and do again: build the season as a whole and make progress step by step,” said Aitken. “Last year we did a great job of taking the challenge to the bigger teams. This year we will carry on that…

BTCC Ex-Formula 1 driver and Le Mans winner Mark Blundell has moved into team management in a deal with the British Touring Car Championship race-winning AmD Tuning squad. AmD will become Mark Blundell Motorsport for 2020, with the 53-year-old taking on the sporting director role. Blundell made his BTCC debut last year in an Audi S3 run by AmD sister team Trade Price Cars Racing, but called time on his driving career after a difficult season. He will be partnered at MBM by long-time AmD boss Hollamby, who will remain as team principal overseeing trackside operations. The team will run a pair of Honda Civic FK2s for Jake Hill (Blundell’s team-mate in 2019) and Sam Osborne (pictured below in testing at Brands Hatch earlier this week). “I made no secret…

WORLD ENDURANCE CHAMPIONSHIP The Rebellion Racing name will disappear from motor racing after this summer. The Swiss entrant, the top LMP1 privateer of the current era, is ending its involvement in the sport less than three months after announcing it was partnering with Peugeot for the French manufacturer’s return to front-line sportscar racing in 2022. The decision by the Rebellion Corporation, the watchmaker owned by Alexandre Pesci, “to reorient its investment policy” after the climax of the current World Endurance Championship campaign in June brings to an end an involvement in endurance racing stretching back to 2007. In the 13 seasons since, Rebellion has claimed no fewer than seven top-six results at the Le Mans 24 Hours, topped the WEC privateers’ P1 classification every year there was one, and notched…

Daytona’s ‘Duel’ qualifying races can bite if you’re not locked in for the 500. Daniel Suarez lost his drive with top Ford team Stewart-Haas Racing in mid-November. He arrived at Daytona with a hastily arranged Toyota ride at Gaunt Brothers, a part-time team aiming for a full season in 2020, without the ‘Charter’ spot guaranteeing its car a start. Suarez’s #96 Camry was strong in the draft, topping 202mph in practice. But, despite running a 2020 engine and body, they were mounted to a 2019 chassis. It meant the team couldn’t run the rear end as low as rivals, to get the huge spoiler out of the airstream, so Suarez was 9mph off pole in qualifying. Forced to race his way in, he was running strongly inside Duel 1’s top…

Marshalling volunteers north of the border Really enjoyed reading the column about marshalling in Autosport’s National racing supplement (30 January); thank you for featuring the volunteers who give up their time to help make motorsport a safer sport for everyone. We just wanted to highlight that the Scottish Motorsport Marshals Club is the only club in Scotland that is dedicated to marshalling. BMMC doesn’t operate north of the border. We also run a motorsport radio group providing safety radio network to events, a motorsport rescue team operating three rescue units to provide immediate medical and technical extrication for incidents, and a motorsport medical group as a community of interest for medics working in pre-hospital trauma care in a motorsport setting. Jon BoltonPublicity and communications coordinatorScottish Motorsport Marshals Clubsmmc.org.uk Filling the…

Formula 1’s all-conquering leading team returned last week: twice. First, Mercedes revealed its 2020 livery and a new tie-up with petrochemical company Ineos – recently famous for buying sports teams in cycling, sailing and football – that modified the team’s colour scheme ever so slightly. Four days later, it showed off its W11 with a digital launch streamed on YouTube, before Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton took turns to shake the car down at Silverstone. But both events revealed interesting indications about what modern F1’s best team is trying to do in 2020, apart from winning everything there is to win, again. This season, it seems, is all about sealing off the minor weaknesses the team has displayed, or others have claimed it has. At the livery launch at the…

FRONT END McLaren ran a tapered nose as far back as an upgrade at the 2018 Spanish Grand Prix. It has now gravitated even further towards the Mercedes design, and it’s even thinner than before. The nose has been tightened up, with a far less cluttered arrangement around the crash structure. In the previous two years, this was home to a central snorkel and two surrounding nostrils, but McLaren has elected to discard these. Instead, the reduced nose size opens up more of the frontal bounding box to a larger cape section. The front wing seems to be distinctly similar to, if not the same as, last year’s design – and perhaps there’s more to come from McLaren in that area. The hint is that the team will retain the…

SUSPENSION AND BARGEBOARDS The front-suspension components have received some attention, and last year’s rather ungainly top wishbone mounting to the upright has been tightened up significantly. Williams continues to make use of the pushrod bracket to steady the rideheight under cornering. Although the bargeboards and turning vanes are largely similar to last year’s car’s, there are some interesting additional details. On top of the ‘boomerang’, there are six flow conditioners that fire air at the sidepod undercut, aiming to improve the flow to the rear of the car. FRONT END The FW43’s front wing is largely the same as the design with which Williams ended last season. For those final flyaway rounds, the team introduced its own version of an inboard-loaded wing geometry, mounting the outboard sections below the notch…

Mitch Evans looked totally at ease on his way to a four-second victory in Mexico City. But this comprehensive triumph was not one founded upon some kind of magic bullet. What he and his Jaguar team did was inherently straightforward: they learned from their mistakes. That notion is hardly a revelation, but it was an open goal missed by their rivals – their championship-winning rivals at that – and in turn it propelled Evans to the top of the standings. Last time out in Santiago, Evans had been comfortable up front again. The polesitter followed a premeditated strategy to use both of the higher-power attack-mode boosts early on and he duly carved out a gap. But a software issue sapped his pace and left him as prey at the halfway…

ASIAN FORMULA 3 SEPANG (MYS) 14-15 FEBRUARY ROUND ⅘ Red Bull Junior Jack Doohan won all three races to slash the points gap to long-time leader Joey Alders to 15. Pinnacle Motorsport driver Doohan led the first race, which took place on a damp track with most of the field on rain tyres, all the way from pole. Alders had qualified seventh, but stormed his BlackArts Racing machine up to second. Another driver on the move was Jamie Chadwick, who passed Nikita Mazepin to claim the final podium spot. After morning downpours, the track dried enough for slicks for race two. In the rush, Alders had what he reckoned was a duff set of tyres he’d used in Q1 fitted. Within a few laps his left-rear was disintegrating, and he…

CIVIC CUP Maximum Motorsport will operate a third series this season after taking over the management of the successful Civic Cup category. The company already runs the Touring Car Trophy and Volkswagen Racing Cup classes but wanted to be involved with a less expensive club-level championship. Maximum boss Stewart Lines believes the British Racing and Sports Car Club-permitted Civic Cup is the perfect fit alongside its existing categories. “It’s a very popular series and we’re expecting a 25-car grid,” said Lines. “We needed a series that was cheap for people to come and have a go at. The VW Cup and Touring Car Trophy are competitively priced but we needed something that people can come and race on treaded tyres. There’s a lot of people out there who haven’t got…

NATIONAL FORMULA FORD 1600 Julian van der Watt, the runaway 2017 South African Formula Ford champion, will contest the 2020 National Formula Ford 1600 season in the UK at the wheel of a Kevin Mills Racing Spectrum. Van der Watt has raced in the UK’s FFord end-of-year events in recent seasons, and started the 2018 Walter Hayes Trophy final from pole position in a Mills-run car. The 22-year-old took 13 wins out of 14 races in his home country’s FFord series in 2017, before moving to the IndyCar-supporting USF2000 Championship in 2018, finishing seventh in the standings. “One of my sponsors has been communicating with Kevin Mills and together they thought this would be a great programme to get me introduced into motorsport in the UK and in Europe,” van…

Driving standards and how to police them often come up in motorsport. Incidents will always happen, and every now and again an organising club or championship will decide a clampdown is needed. Safety is an ever-present issue, and if a series gets a reputation for being too lax on rough driving some competitors can be put off, so an organiser’s attempt to improve things is usually welcome. But the recent Masters Historic Racing stance is slightly baffling (see page 72). One of the leading organisers of historic series, it has specifically picked out‘pro’ drivers as a problem, by which it seems to chiefly mean young drivers, some of them probably better described as aspiring professionals. Some pros do step out of line – I can recall one Le Mans 24…

FORMULA 1 Imola has offered to host a Formula 1 round in place of April’s postponed Chinese Grand Prix, though the circuit’s boss acknowledges the bid could be“mission impossible”. The circuit, which last hosted a world championship round when it held the San Marino Grand Prix in 2006 (below), has approached the Italian motorsport federation about the possibility of staging a race. Imola president Uberto Selvatico Estense insisted the venue could be ready on time. “It would be very difficult to arrange it, but the track is ready,” he told Autosport. “We can move very fast to host a grand prix as we did in the past. We would not be at our best, of course. But if it’s necessary, we will move on with it.” But Selvatico Estense acknowledged…

S5000 Multiple grand prix winner Rubens Barrichello and Lewis Hamilton’s GP2 team-mate Alexandre Premat will both be on the grid at the Australian Grand Prix – in the Albert Park event’s support races for the new S5000 single-seater series. Ex-Ferrari star Barrichello provided the headline act for the inaugural round of the series at Sandown last September (above), taking second in a crash-shortened feature race, and he’s now locked into a return to Team BRM for the two high-profile events that bookend the 2020 schedule. While Barrichello will next month look to add more Albert Park podium finishes to the five he took as an F1 driver, he will then head back down under in November for the inaugural Bathurst International, where he’ll sample the Mount Panorama circuit for the…

DTM Williams Formula 1 refugee Robert Kubica will contest the 2020 DTM season in a customer BMW operated by single-seater giant ART Grand Prix, which returns to the series after a three-year absence. Kubica becomes the seventh BMW driver in the series alongside the marque’s six factory signings in a deal that inches the grid up to 15 cars – still short of the 18 from last season, before the pullout for 2020 of the R-Motorsport Aston Martins. ART operated two factory Mercedes entries in 2015 and 2016, running Gary Paffett and Lucas Auer in the first season, and Paffett and Esteban Ocon the following year, before Ocon’s (right) call-up to F1 resulted in Felix Rosenqvist replacing him. When the manufacturers downscaled to six cars each in 2017, Mercedes moved…

DTM One of the most significant figures behind Audi’s recent DTM success has stepped down and entered retirement. Arno Zensen, 63, has left his post as director of Team Rosberg, which carried Rene Rast to the 2017 and 2019 DTM crowns. Together with Rast’s team-mate Jamie Green, Team Rosberg-run Audis have won 26 races in the past five years. The popular and ever-helpful Zensen is being replaced by the team’s long-time sporting chief Kimmo Liimatainen – the 41-year-old Finn was a race winner as a driver with Team Rosberg in the 2002 German Formula 3 Championship, but then hung up his helmet and has since been employed on the management side. Zensen, previously team manager at the Walter Lechner Racing Formula Ford squad, has been ever-present at Team Rosberg since…

The ruthless reality of Red Bull’s junior programme isn’t exactly new. But some of its members getting second (or third) chances is a relatively recent change. In 2017, Brendon Hartley was brought back. At the end of the following year, Alexander Albon was plucked from a plum Formula E deal to rejoin the Red Bull fold, and Daniil Kvyat, who had barely been jettisoned when Hartley and Pierre Gasly were being brought through, returned to Toro Rosso. Last year, Gasly was the latest driver to feel the sting of Red Bull demotion. Now, he’s the latest to attempt Red Bull resurrection. For the first time in his single-seater career, Gasly is going into a new season feeling the benefits of staying with a team – even if it was one…

The Teatro Romolo Valli is quite a setting. The sharply tiered, elliptical opera house is a place built to showcase drama. So, it could be that Ferrari was sending a message by choosing the venue for the launch of its 2020 Formula 1 car – the SF1000. After a lengthy, dance-filled build-up, the Italian squad’s new challenger was revealed. Initially, things didn’t look too different to the car that won three races and took nine poles last year, but there is plenty that’s new. Although the stable regulations from 2019 mean the car is indeed an evolution of the SF90, Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto explained on stage that his designers had gone “extreme on all the concepts” it was carrying over to the new machine. “We try to go…

FRONT END Possibly one of the biggest visual changes over last year’s RB15 is a thinner, more complex nose design. Taking a leaf from Mercedes’ book, the team has tapered in the nose at the bulkhead to give a larger cape section. As a result, aerodynamicists have more flexibility in developing ways to generate downforce, reducing some of their reliance on the front wing to do so. This gives Red Bull the opportunity to trim back the outboard ends of its front wing to help set up the aero flow paths for the rest of the car. There are a few further notable changes. Either side of the main snorkel, there are additional nostrils that appear to guide airflow onto the rear section of the cape. Red Bull used the…

CONCEPT The AlphaTauri AT01 is not wildly different to the STR14. The car, perhaps, has been slightly Red Bullified, but that’s a legacy of its arrangement to use components designed for the lead team. Using old-spec designs – albeit built as new – AlphaTauri has a tried-and-tested frontrunning set of components that it doesn’t have to expend resources developing itself. That extends from the gearbox and engine intake systems to the brakes and suspension – including the multilink front suspension from last season. Since Jody Egginton took over as technical director, Toro Rosso/AlphaTauri has pushed that B-team approach to almost Haas levels, allowing the team to boost its reliability by putting the freed-up resources into other areas of the team. It also opens up greater design crossover between AlphaTauri and…

Losing isn’t all bad if you’re Elfyn Evans. Having let his shot at Monte Carlo Rally glory“slip away” on the final morning last month, it was a “more determined” Welshman who arrived in Sweden for an event that was truncated by the unseasonable weather, and starved of a meaningful battle for victory once Evans got into his dominant stride. The sprint-style format (there were a mere 92.30 competitive miles compared to the planned 186.93), allied with a performance that his Toyota team boss, three-time Sweden Rally winner Tommi Makinen, admitted had left him stunned, meant Evans pretty much had the rally won after he edged world champion Ott Tanak by 1.1 seconds on the first stage. Granted, Evans had another eight stages to go and was 0.9s slower than his…

The Jaguar I-PACE eTrophy was dealt a tough hand in Mexico City. Qualifying was first delayed by 25 minutes owing to the extensive track repairs needed after Daniel Abt’s shunt in Formula E free practice. Then the shootout for pole was canned altogether and the grid for the one-make series was decided on the results of practice. Biblical rain arrived on Friday night, again playing havoc with the timetable. With worries that the bulk of the 11-car grid might chew up the sodden asphalt, the race was delayed until after the main FE event. Last to run on a well-used and degrading surface, the contest itself was blighted by punctures. The entire field made an even launch. That stopped second-starting Simon Evans from replicating his brother Mitch’s moves in the…

BRDC BRITISH FORMULA 3 Carlin has become the first team to test the new-for-2020 modifications that will be used in the BRDC British Formula 3 Championship this season. A number of revisions have been incorporated into the Tatuus car – first introduced in 2016 – that include upgraded front and rear wings to generate more downforce, bargeboards to help channel airflow under the car, and a slimmer engine cover featuring a fin. An Advanced Frontal Protection (AFP) fin has also been integrated in front of the driver, which will help deflect debris away from the cockpit opening. Mountune has taken over the engine tuning from Cosworth and all cars have been fitted with updated electrical equipment. Carlin was the first team to run with the changes at Oulton Park earlier…

SCOTTISH FF1600 Scottish Formula Ford 1600 champion Jordan Gronkowski says he is in “a race against time” to secure the budget to go for a second title after suffering a major engine failure in testing. Gronkowski, who won the crown for the first time in 2019, managed just four installation laps in his family-run Van Diemen JL012K before stopping on his way out of the pits at Knockhill. The setback leaves Gronkowski fighting to secure enough funding to complete the full season, putting his title defence at risk, although he is confident of making it out at least for the pre-season test at Knockhill in March and the opening round at the same circuit in April. “It’s not the ideal start to the season,” he said. “I had done a…

BOOK REVIEW FORMULA ONE: THE CHAMPIONS: 70 YEARS OF LEGENDARY F1 DRIVERS Few would dispute long-serving Formula 1 correspondent Maurice Hamilton when he describes the F1 World Championship as “the ultimate accolade in motorsport”. Those who have achieved it are an elite group – just 33 people from the championship’s 70 years and out of the 600-plus drivers who have competed. Hamilton’s latest book, Formula One: The Champions – due for release on 3 March – is a fitting tribute to the select band. It is a stylishly presented and sizeable 240-page hardback containing written and photographic portrayals of every one of those champions, from Giuseppe Farina through to Nico Rosberg. All of them are brought to life in Hamilton’s concise-yet-illuminating prose, and richly illustrated with high-quality and varied images…

Stirling Moss (#7) works his Kieft-Norton through the field on his way to victory in the 15-lap 500cc Formula 3 support race for the 1952 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. In the previous year’s encounter Moss had been untouchable, coming home 50 seconds ahead of the pack. Now he had a proper scrap on his hands, getting into the lead, dropping to fourth place, fighting back, then being demoted to second place by Don Parker’s Kieft. Moss had no answer, but luck was on his side when the leader’s primary chain broke on the last lap. For classic motorsport DVDs head to dukevideo.com For more great photographs, visit motorsportimages.com…