Formula One News — November 1995

AS suggested last week, the DAMS team did not make the official deadline for entry in the 1996 FIA Formula 1 World Championship - although wheeler-dealer boss Jean-Paul Driot is saying that he has not given up hope, and he hopes to finalize sponsorship deals within the next month.

WITHIN the next fortnight the FIA World Motor Sport Council will meet in Monte Carlo and will be presented with a more detailed Formula 1 calendar.

MCLAREN'S Ron Dennis is digging in for a winter of hard work and is promising that 1996 will see McLaren returning to the winning circle.

SAUBER is expected to decide within the next week who will be partnering Heinz-Harald Frentzen in the team next year.

LIGIER'S planned test at Estoril last week - scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - was called off at the last-minute.

THE most important man for a top Formula 1 driver is his race engineer.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER, Jean Alesi and Gerhard Berger were all in action for their new teams at Estoril in Portugal last week, and although times from the testing are pretty meaningless because they were merely getting to know the engineers and the cars, all three were beaten by F1 new boy Jacques Villeneuve in his Williams-Renault.

ADAM OPEL AG, the German offshoot of American giant General Motors, has had a major shake-up in its competition department management - and a keen F1 fan has been put in charge.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER had his first laps in a Ferrari Formula 1 car last week at the team's Fiorano test track near Modena, Italy.

MIKA HAKKINEN remains in the hospital in Adelaide following his November 10 accident during qualifying for the Australian GP.

WHILE Ron Dennis hopes that Mika Hakkinen will be fit to drive for McLaren next year, he will also be having to face up the fact that he may have lost the Finn and will have to make contingency plans to replace him.

TOM WALKINSHAW loves to spring surprises, and the word on the street in F1 is that the team's mystery driver in this week's test at Estoril is to be Indycar star Robby Gordon, who won two races this year (Phoenix and Detroit) in one of Derrick Walker's Reynard-Ford 95Is.

THERE has been political uproar in Melbourne in recent days following the announcement that the 1996 Australian Grand Prix - to be held in Albert Park in March next year - is to be sponsored by Transurban, a road-building company which has just won a $1 billion deal to build a controversial new City Link road around Melbourne.

THE organizers of the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne are trying to convince the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to have the Australian Grand Prix in the 2000 included in the Olympic Games, which are to be held in Sydney.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER'S younger brother Ralf yesterday won the most important race on the Formula 3 calendar - the Macau Grand Prix, which is held on the streets of the tiny Portuguese enclave on the south China coast near Hong Kong.

DAMON HILL'S victory for Williams at Adelaide was remarkable in that his margin of victory over Olivier Panis was two complete laps of the 2.349-mile circuit - margin of victory of nearly five miles!

AUSTRIAN Karl Wendlinger - a bright young hope in F1 until an accident at Monaco in May 1994, which left him in a coma for several weeks.

THE Ligier F1 team heads to Estoril a week from today intending to continue its evaluation testing of young drivers.

MCLAREN driver Mika Hakkinen is in the hospital in Adelaide, Australia, following a severe accident during qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix last Friday.

THE Red Bull Sauber Ford team is expected to announce within a matter of days who is to join Heinz-Harald Frentzen in 1996.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER flew out of Adelaide on Monday morning, bound for Europe where he is due to drive a Formula 1 Ferrari for the first term at the team's Fiorano test track on Thursday.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER says that he isn't planning to get old in Formula 1 racing.

WHILE a few members of the F1 circus are taking the next few weeks off to recover after the long Grand Prix season, the majority of people are rushing back to Europe to get ready for an intensive testing program for the winter months.

THIS year everyone in Adelaide will be complaining that Melbourne has stolen the Australian Grand Prix for 1996 and beyond.

NEWLY-CROWNED Formula 1 World Champion Michael Schumacher goes to Adelaide this weekend aiming to score his 10th win of the season - which would be an all-time record in Grand Prix racing history.