Innehållsförteckning för 07/02/19 från Autosport

Formula 1 launch season is fast approaching and there are plenty of unknowns ahead of the new season. With that in mind, we’ve asked former grand prix driver-turned-television pundit Karun Chandhok the big questions of 2019 in this week’s cover piece on page 16. Arguably the two most intriguing things we want to find out, aside from whether the new aero rules will work, are: can Red Bull and Honda put together a championship fight in their first year together?; how will Sebastian Vettel cope with the arrival of rising star Charles Leclerc at Ferrari after that tricky end to 2018? Whatever the answers to those questions are, we all hope that there will be someone to challenge Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes, the combination that has provided such a high…

The Sauber name will disappear from the Formula 1 grid in 2019 after the team struck a deal to allow Alfa Romeo to take over the full name of the team and its chassis. Alfa has successfully requested to take over the chassis name from Sauber as well as the team’s entry. It cements the Italian manufacturer’s first fully badged F1 entry since 1985 as an extension of the partnership that began with Sauber last year. Sauber Motorsport AG, which remains independent of Alfa Romeo’s investment in the team, is still the company behind the entry. An entrant’s company, team and chassis names can all be changed after the original entry list is published. An F1 Commission vote was necessary because of the commercial agreements between F1 and the teams,…

World Rally Championship fans could be getting two countries for the price of one in the future. That’s if FIA president Jean Todt gets his wish. The WRC’s calendar is currently hugely oversubscribed with countries from the world’s four corners vying for one of 14 slots, while next year we’re likely to lose two European rounds to allow Japan and Kenya a seat at the table. The teams don’t want any more rallies – although they probably would stomach one more – but WRC Promoter does. Which is why Todt is encouraging more countries to follow the lead of rounds one and two, with the Monte Carlo Rally working with France, and Rally Sweden using Norwegian stages. “I want a global championship and so I want rallies in Europe where…

Jacques Villeneuve comebacks come along about as frequently as Ferrari changes its Formula 1 team principals. But this one is different – he’s going to be representing the Prancing Horse, and driving with the #27. The number that passed into lore with the Ferrari heroics of Villeneuve’s father Gilles will adorn the 488 GT3 that the 47-year-old Canadian will race in the Italian GT Championship. To be fair, #27 is already synonymous in Italian GT circles with the team he will be racing for – the successful Scuderia Baldini 27. The team of Fabio Baldini is no stranger to ambitious driver line-ups. Last year the squad ran Giancarlo Fisichella alongside Stefano Gai in its lead car, and Gai only narrowly missed out on the title (Fisichella couldn’t win it, as…

Waiting for an outbreak of common sense When will common sense ever prevail in the world of motorsport? The fact that you have to even ask this question in an industry full of seemingly highly intelligent people seems rather ridiculous. But when it comes to creating new championships all common sense seems to go AWOL. Last week’s Club Autosport Opinion and the story about Peter Auto plotting to rival the Masters Endurance Legends championship point to the heart of what is wrong with motorsport in general – too many championships for the same types of cars. Historic motorsport seems to be getting more and more popular as the years pass, both for drivers and spectators, and the introduction of more up to date cars into the historic scene is a…

Paris sophisticate Jean-Pierre Wimille was the man and driver whom Juan Manuel Fangio from backwater Balcarce aspired to be: graceful within the cockpit, gracious without. Separated by three years and an ocean of experience, they were Gordini team-mates briefly during Argentina’s Formule Libre Temporada series of 1948 when the Frenchman dispensed a harsh lesson before singing the defeated local man’s praises as a future ace. Fangio in turn treasured a photograph of them together, grinning, united in speed. Wimille was embarking on the season that would cement his place as the world’s best driver – an accolade not then accorded official status. As the only non-Italian at Alfa Corse – and a Resistance man at that – he won two of the Big Three Grandes Epreuves of 1948 in France…

Balfe Motorsport will be the first team to run the new McLaren 720S GT3 in the UK this year in the British GT Championship. The Lincolnshire squad, which has already confirmed a return to GT4 with a 570S for Michael O’Brien and Graham Johnson, will enter the new car for team co-owner Shaun Balfe and McLaren Automotive factory driver Rob Bell. Balfe and Bell won the 2017 International GT Open Pro-Am championship together and combined for a part-season British GT effort last year in the previous-generation McLaren 650S GT3, which was interrupted by a big crash for Balfe at Rockingham. Bell has been instrumental in developing the 720S GT3 together with Joe Osborne and Ben Barnicoat, but missed out on the car’s race debut at the Gulf 12 Hours in…

Junior Saloon Car Championship runner-up Joel Wren will switch to the Fiesta Junior Championship this year, driving a newly built car run by his family team. Wren was a seven-time race winner in his debut season in cars, and the 15-year-old hopes to continue that form in more powerful machinery. “My dad and I have always liked the look of Fiestas, and they’re a bit quicker as well,” said Wren. “I just thought I’ve learnt what I can [in the JSCC]. I knew I was capable. The only reason I didn’t win the championship was because of one DNF I had.” Another newcomer to Fiesta Junior will be 14-year-old Nathan Burns, younger brother of Clio Cup racer Bradley. The BRSCC insists it is committed to Fiesta Junior despite the category…

The extraordinary MAP Diesel shared by Frenchmen Pierre Veyron and Fernand Lacour dwarfs the dainty Gordini T15S of Juan Manuel Fangio and Jose Froilan Gonzalez during the early stages of the 1950 Le Mans 24 Hours. The leviathan carrying the #1, from the curiously named Manufacture d’Armes de Paris (one-time builder of small arms, typewriters and tractors), was the first car to race at the legendary enduro with a mid-mounted engine – in this instance a supercharged five-litre flat-four oil-burner. Overheating put paid to its challenge after 39 laps. The Argentinian duo, both Le Mans debutants, clocked up 95 laps before their 1491cc supercharged Simca four cried enough. FOR MORE GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS, VISIT MOTORSPORTIMAGES.COM…

There are so many things in my career that I would do differently if I had a second bite of the cherry. I have always been, and still am, independent, although I’m a more benign independent now and have a broader view of things. For starters, I might have had a shorter haircut! Although my career started over 40 years ago, there are some general principles that young drivers today can and should learn from. Motorsport is a village In my day, there were very few teams in Formula Ford and even Formula 3. Instead we had different chassis, although the current trend for junior motorsport is to have one chassis operated by different teams. It goes without saying that, budget permitting, you should always try to have the very…

01 MOBIL 1 Turn 1 As you come out of the last corner, you’re looking to take advantage of the steeper incline downhill towards the first corner, so you’ll typically see the train of cars sweeping in from the outside of the last corner in towards the pitwall where it falls away quite sharply. Midway down the pitwall or thereabouts, you then start to come back across the road heading for the outside of the track under the bridge to end up parallel to the grass verge. It’s a second-gear corner and it’s all about compromise, because it’s not a typical V-shape hairpin where you can brake as late as possible. It’s basically a U-shape and cambers in from your turn-in point, so you come down into the corner a…

As British Touring Car Championship racer Bobby Thompson jokes, the young drivers in the BRDC Rising Stars and SuperStars programmes are all very different individuals, who probably wouldn’t be friends in the outside world. But as all share a common passion for racing, there’s always plenty to discuss whenever they get together – whether it be shared racing memories, plans for the future or talk of the current state of Formula 1. “They represent us every week so well; they wear the club badge with pride and rightly so,” says BRDC club operations director Luke Evans. “They have been scouted by a panel of experts in motorsport, and we hope that, in the future, they will become full members of the BRDC. We always want to do something to support…

You’ve passed your ARDS test, got your new machine ready for your first race and, after months of waiting, you’re almost ready to hit the track. But before you do there remains one daunting, but necessary, final hurdle – buy your racing equipment. With various top-name brands on the market such as Alpinestars, OMP and Sparco, plus helmet manufacturers including Bell, Schuberth and Arai offering a plethora of items at a range of prices, it can be difficult to know exactly what you need. So what does an enthusiastic amateur starting out need to go club racing, and how do you make sure you get the best equipment for your budget? National governing body Motorsport UK dictates that all drivers competing in one of its sanctioned events must have an…

“Welcome to what I think will be the biggest adventure of our time.” That was how ABB FIA Formula E Championship CEO Alejandro Agag last week launched his latest project: Extreme E, an off-road electric SUV racing series designed to test the emerging technology and highlight climate change damage. The idea was conceived nearly two years ago when Agag had a breakfast meeting with two-time Indianapolis 500 winner and current McLaren Formula 1 sporting director and Extreme E chairman Gil de Ferran. It’s come on quite a bit since then. XE will hold events in five remote areas of the world – the Arctic, the Himalayas, the Sahara desert, the Amazon rainforest and islands in the Indian Ocean. The championship will be based on a floating paddock – the soon-to-be…

Ferrari plans to increase its Formula 1 budget this season to try to end its long championship win drought. The Italian squad has not won a title since its constructors’ success in 2008, with Kimi Raikkonen claiming its last drivers’ crown to date the year before. “While our performance last year was the best one since we won the constructors’ championship in 2008, we fell short of our ambition to raise the winners’ cup,”Ferrari chairman and CEO Louis Camilleri told investors in a conference call last week. “Our objective going forward remains the same as it has always been: to win. In 2019 we project an increase in spending which partially reflects this ambition, but also includes the development expenditures required to address the new tactical regulations that will form…

The BMW M8 GTE may end up having a very short lifespan. The German manufacturer has stated that its programmes with the car will be reviewed after the end of its current assaults on the World Endurance and IMSA SportsCar championships. BMW was responding to speculation that it could quit the WEC after only one campaign at the end of 2018-19 superseason. But its motorsport boss, Jens Marquardt, insisted that no decisions had been made. “There are still a lot of things we have to look into in the WEC; we definitely haven’t extracted the maximum performance from our package,” he said. “That’s what we’ll focus on with the remaining races. Once we’ve wrapped up everything, we’re going to sit down and assess and see where we go in the…

WHAT IMPACT WILL THE NEW AERO REGULATIONS HAVE? It has become increasingly clear that one of the biggest changes everyone wants to see from Formula 1 is for cars that can follow each other and race more closely. As time has passed, the whole tone about the rule changes seems to have gone from ‘it’s going to make a significant improvement to overtaking’ to be more about ‘well, it may not make much of a difference but if we didn’t do it, then things would be worse next year’. While I understand that logic, it still begs the question of why it’s being rushed through at a significant cost to the teams when there’s a major rule change coming in 2021 anyway. Red Bull’s Helmut Marko, for example, has talked…

BATHURST 12 HOUR MOUNT PANORAMA (AUS) FEBRUARY 3 INTERCONTINENTAL GT CHALLENGE, ROUND 1/5 As seven cars were in contention until the final 20 minutes of the race, it was always going to take something special to decide the 2019 Bathurst 12 Hour. In the end it was Matt Campbell that provided the necessary spark, a trio of ruthless passes in the closing stages setting the #912 Earl Bamber Motorsport Porsche 911 GT3 R up for a remarkable farewell win. Unusually for the brutal Mount Panorama circuit, it wasn’t a race of attrition. Rather it was the greenest race ever, just eight safety cars in total and a record-breaking 312 laps completed by the seven cars that battled it out until the end. That’s not to say there weren’t casualties along…

Reigning British GT4 champion Jack Mitchell and runner-up Ben Tuck have been invited by BMW Motorsport to compete for the chance to join the marque’s junior programme. In an evaluation process that started in Munich on Monday and was due to finish yesterday (Wednesday), the Century Motorsport team-mates were pitched against a group of 20 drivers who had raced with BMW customer teams in 2018. Observed by BMW factory ace Philipp Eng, the group was due to be whittled down to four after a series of mental and physical tests, with a simulator shootout deciding the winner. On offer is a full-season drive for the works-affiliated ROAL Motorsport team in the Italian GT championship. Century Motorsport boss Nathan Freke said: “We work incredibly hard to help develop young drivers and…

The popular Ginetta GT5 Challenge has already attracted a 36-car entry, despite there being almost three months until the season starts. The category for G40 cars features on the British Touring Car and British GT packages and this year also has an away round at Zandvoort. “The grid was predominantly full [last year] and that leads to people not wanting to miss out and entering early,” said Ginetta motorsport manager Ash Gallagher. The maximum capacity for the Oulton Park season opener at the end of April is 38 cars, so there are only two full-season spaces available, but other circuits such as Silverstone Grand Prix can accommodate many more additional entries. Among the new drivers for this year is 2017 Mini Se7en champion Charlie Budd, who will be competing as…

Andrew Jordan, the 2013 British Touring Car champion, will race a pre-1966 Mini Cooper in selected events this year. The Jordan Racing Team is currently preparing the Appendix K machine previously raced by Dan Wheeler. Jordan hopes to share the car with his father – fellow BTCC race winner Mike Jordan – in Historic Racing Drivers Club events in 2019, and contest The Mini Celebration Trophy at July’s Silverstone Classic, celebrating 60 years of Alec Issigonis’s famous front-wheel-drive design. “My first racing car – in Junior Rallycross – was a Mini and I’ve got a Mini road car,” said Jordan Jr. “We looked at building a new one, then saw this in an auction. It’s got a lot of the right bits on it, so we’re just refurbing it and…

Goodwood has revealed the first high-profile drivers who will compete in the 2019 Members’ Meeting, featuring 11 overall and class winners of the Le Mans 24 Hours. Five decades of Le Mans success and 24 outright wins will be represented. Most notably, Guy Smith, Dieter Quester, Neel Jani, Alex Wurz and Hans-Joachim Stuck will all make their Goodwood racing debuts on April 6-7. Double Le Mans victor Romain Dumas is a new entry for the Members’ Meeting, having made his Motor Circuit debut in the 2012 Revival. They will be joined by regular Goodwood faces Darren Turner, Jochen Mass, Emanuele Pirro, Tom Kristensen and Richard Attwood. Smith, who will compete in the flagship Gerry Marshall Trophy race, said: “I am still a relative novice on the Goodwood Circuit as while…

BOOK REVIEW FUELIN’ AROUND RRP £9.99 “Just imagine a family headed to Grandma’s house for Sunday dinner, creeping along at 5mph thanks to the race traffic letting out, and you see about 10 men wearing uniforms, their backs to the traffic, standing in a row, urinating at the side of the road.” So goes one of many tales told by Jim Kelly in his latest work, Fuelin’ Around. Not your typical motorsport-related biography, the book charts his career with a fuel company, regaling the reader with anecdotes from 30-plus years in the industry. After starting out working in the family funeral business, Kelly tells a particularly harrowing story of comforting a mother on the loss of her child, while placing their body in a small coffin. To cope with the…

WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN? WHO IS THIS? This dark knight made his name in the sport in a way that will probably never be equalled. He flew in at the smallest level but was soon good enough to ply his trade further afield. When they rolled out the barrel he found a home from home, and revelled in their back-to-front approach. But when they became set in their ways he was forced to go it alone, which he did to great success. His wings were spread far and wide and from bottom to top. Despite his burgeoning empire he kept it up behind the wheel, showing the bright young things a trick or too, even if there was a Princely mistake along the way. When the time came to call…

The people you have around you make a huge difference to how you feel when you get thrust into the spotlight in a new series, and for the most part I’ve been very fortunate in my career. It doesn’t get any better than having Roger Penske to call your first Indy 500, does it? And not only Roger, but having Rick Mears to talk to and Helio Castroneves and Will Power as my team-mates, I had great people around me. When I did the Daytona 24 for the first time in 2006 with Michael Shank, I had no idea what to expect, but as a young driver you’re always eager to prove yourself. Fortunately doing it with guys that I trusted – I had known Ozz Negri for five or…

Le Mans 24 Hours winner Team Goh will end a 10-year absence from the race tracks in 2019. This season it will mount a domestic campaign with the McLaren 720S GT3, but team owner Kazumichi Goh has long-term aspirations to return to the big race in France that it won with Audi in 2004. Goh is reviving the relationship with McLaren – and the colour scheme – that yielded the 1996 Japanese GT title with the F1 GTR (right, below). The team will run the car in the GT300 class of the Super GT Series and in Super Taikyu this year. The team’s international aspirations will manifest themselves in an attack on the Suzuka 10 Hours Intercontinental GT Challenge round in August. A full IGTC campaign will follow in 2020.…

DTM chief Gerhard Berger is confident of attracting 16-18 cars for Formula European Masters, the continuation series for cars from the old FIA Formula 3 European Championship. Formel 3 Vermarktungs, the subsidiary of the DTM-promoting ITR that organised European F3 and is running FEM, has taken on long-time F3 mover-and-shaker Peter Dahlmanns in a bid to boost entries. Dahlmanns was the right-hand man of Bertram Schafer in the German F3 Cup, which ran from 2003-14. “When we finally decided to do it [run the FEM series], we’ve been not positioned to do it [try to attract teams],”explained Berger. “Before, the work was split between FIA, us and whoever. Now it’s different, it’s just us, and we were looking for a leading personality who knows the teams, who has the network,…

Additional stats compilation by Graham Keilloh and Elliot Wood Rating the performances of Formula 1 drivers is one of the most entertaining – and controversial – topics for fans and journalists. Weighing up how well a driver has done given their circumstances, machinery and experience is a complicated task and there is always scope for disagreement. The readers’ 2018 poll agreed with Autosport’s driver rater Edd Straw that Lewis Hamilton was the top performer of the season, but after that there were some key discrepancies. Although Autosport sporadically did driver ratings before, it has only consistently done so since 2009. That means we now have 10 full seasons of data, so now is the time to see which drivers our numbers say have performed best over the past decade. F1’S…

TOYOTA RACING SERIES TAUPO (NZL) FEBRUARY 2-3 ROUND 4/5 Marcus Armstrong won the headline Denny Hulme Memorial Trophy at Taupo, but a suspension failure earlier in the weekend wrecked two races for the Ferrari junior and means that fellow Kiwi Liam Lawson takes a narrow points lead into this weekend’s finale – the New Zealand Grand Prix at Manfeild. The action kicked off with a rescheduled race from the gale-force-wind-marred Teretonga weekend. Lawson led all the way, while Armstrong held second until Mercedes DTM refugee Lucas Auer pulled off a great move at one-third distance to move into the runner-up spot. Armstrong then had to focus on keeping ahead of Artem Petrov, the Russian completing a 1-2-3-4 for the M2 Competition squad. Auer took his first win of the campaign…

Leading Renault UK Clio Cup squad Team Pyro will not compete in the final season of the category this year as it instead focuses on new programmes in TCR Germany and the Radical SR1 Cup. Pyro drivers have won the Clio title – which Renault has decided to axe at the end of this season – eight times since it first entered the category in 2005, while Max Coates narrowly missed out on becoming another Pyro champion last season. “It’s a shame to leave because we’ve been around the series for a long time, but things have to change,” said team boss Mark Hunt. “With it being the last year, I don’t see the benefit of continuing. If we get someone new in, it’s for only one year when it…

I’ve dodged this column for long enough and now I’m just going to have to level with you. My first motorsport memory? Well, I’ve, er… forgotten it. My mother despairs of my inability to remember pivotal life events; for ages I passed off a first living memory of a grandparent throwing a sweet out of a hospital window to my sister. Turns out that was my sister’s first memory. I was an hour old at the time… In the desire for meaningful copy for this page, I’ve wracked my brains and come up with a definitive answer: Donington Park, SS5 of the 1979 RAC Rally. Two things happened that day, one I recall distinctly and the other I’ve been passed second-hand. My memory is of a white Ford Escort RS2000…

After a stellar first season in Formula 1, Charles Leclerc earned a promotion to Ferrari. And the 2019 grid is set to feature the most exciting rookie crop since Kimi Raikkonen, Fernando Alonso and Juan Pablo Montoya all arrived in 2001. The top three finishers in the 2018 Formula 2 championship, George Russell (Williams), Lando Norris (McLaren) and Alex Albon (Toro Rosso), plus 2016 runner-up Antonio Giovinazzi (Sauber), will get their chance to shine and hope to show the same mix of speed, rapid rate of progression and maturity that helped Leclerc gain his Ferrari shot. But no matter how good the machinery at their disposal – both Jacques Villeneuve and Lewis Hamilton launched credible title challenges as rookies in 1996 and 2007 – no first-year driver can reasonably expect…

Young racing drivers may not be the most orthodox ambassadors for safe road driving, but the IAM Y RoadSmart programme knows that a new approach is needed if a positive change in road safety is to occur. The charity (formerly called the Institute of Advanced Motorists), which counts 1992 world champion Nigel Mansell as honourary president, has been the UK’s leading road safety advocate since it was founded in 1956. It sets out to improve road users’ skills with a national network of expert volunteers, offering training for riders and drivers in more than 200 local groups. In December, 15 top racing talents from the British Racing Drivers’ Club’s Rising Stars and SuperStars programmes – plus one Autosport journalist – were invited to take part in IAM RoadSmart’s new Formula…

Given the Fittipaldi family’s strong track record on safety – Emerson had led calls for a drivers’ strike at the ill-fated 1975 Spanish Grand Prix in which Rolf Stommelen’s accident led to the deaths of five spectators – it should come as little surprise that Christian Fittipaldi found himself in the eye of the storm as F1 grappled with the losses of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger at Imola in 1994. Named a representative of the revived Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (GPDA) alongside Gerhard Berger and Michael Schumacher, Fittipaldi was involved in the controversial decision to install a temporary chicane at the Circuit de Catalunya that year. “No one is out to get killed, we’re not going to war” “In hindsight I don’t think it was the brightest thing we…

A key factor in Christian Fittipaldi’s longevity has been his popular standing with all his teams, from Formula 3 to the present day. Aside from Action Express Racing, for which he has raced on and off since 2011, the Brazilian’s longest spell at one team was seven years at Newman-Haas Racing between 1996 and 2002, where he worked with ex-Tyrrell engineer Brian Lisles before Lisles was promoted to general manager. Lisles believes Fittipaldi was every bit a match for team-mate Michael Andretti on speed, but was “maybe not as robust”. “I always remember him with a big smile on his face,” says Lisles. “In fact, I remember him much more as a man than I do as a driver to be honest. I still see Christian every now and again…