Formula One News — August 1998

THE annual musical chairs of Formula 1 engineers continues with rumors that Mike Coughlan, the chief designer of the Arrows team, is planning to leave Tom Walkinshaw's team to take up a new position with the yet-to-be-announced Honda Formula 1 team.

SEVERAL Grand Prix teams are expected to enter teams in the Formula 3000 series next year, when it is expected to be renamed as the F1 Junior World Championship.

JUDITH GRIGGS - the Australian who many believe is being groomed as a possible future chief executive of Formula 1 Holdings when Bernie Ecclestone decides to retire - is to work for Paddy McNally's Allsport Management in Geneva.

JORDAN may have won its first Grand Prix this weekend in Belgium but the team's technical director Gary Anderson will not be staying with the team and the word in the paddock at Spa was that Anderson will shortly begin work as the new technical director of Tom Walkinshaw's Arrows operation.

TOM WALKINSHAW is understood to be moving away from the idea of running with Supertec V10 engines next year, preferring to spend the $23m which is being demanded for the French engines to develop his own promising V10 power units.

IN recent days we have heard stories of a major falling-out within the management structure at British American Racing with the stories suggesting that managing-director Craig Pollock has split up with his partner Julian Jakobi.

WE believe that Tom Walkinshaw and British American Racing's Craig Pollock are in the process of trying to negotiate a deal which will see Brazilian Pedro Diniz switch from Arrows to BAR as Jacques Villeneuve's team mate.

DAMON HILL and Ralf Schumacher took advantage of a mistake by Michael Schumacher in the Belgian GP to score Jordan Grand Prix's first Formula 1 victory in fine style, the pair finishing first and second at Spa. The result puts the team into a fighting fifth in the Constructors' Championship, within reach of both Williams and Benetton.

THE Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company will be pulling out of Formula 1 at the end of this season - and there do not appear to be any plans for the American company to substitute Goodyear with Dunlop.

RALF SCHUMACHER has signed a four-year deal with Williams Grand Prix Engineering - if stories in the German press are to be believed. Everyone involved in the negotiations denies that any deal has been done, although they admit that talks are taking place.

THE Honda Motor Company is to support a brand new single-seater series in Japan, which is intended to replace the existing Formula Nippon and to be a stepping-stone for Japanese drivers into Formula 1.

WITH attention beginning to turn to the 1999 cars the Formula 1 teams went testing at a variety of different locations last week with some teams in action at Monza and Mugello (which has a similar character to Spa) in Italy; at Magny-Cours in France, at Barcelona in Spain and at Silverstone in England.

HEINZ-HARALD FRENTZEN spent the early part of last week in the hospital in Vienna, Austria, undergoing tests in an attempt to ascertain the cause of the illness which hampered his efforts during the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend.

BERNIE ECCLESTONE flew to South Africa last week to meet with President Nelson Mandela and discuss the possibility of South Africa returning to the Formula 1 calendar with a long-term deal.

IN February we predicted that Goodyear could buy the Dunlop tire company and switch its Formula 1 tire program from Goodyear branding to that of Dunlop.

NASCAR star Jeff Gordon has confirmed that he did receive several approaches from Formula 1 teams - as we exclusively reported in June - but the stock car racer says that he is not going to leave NASCAR, although he would love to be given the chance to test a Grand Prix car at some point. In addition to Williams we believe that Gordon was offered an F1 drive by the new British American Racing team.

WORK has just begun on McLaren's new factory at Mizen's Farm to the north of Woking, in Surrey.

THE principal players in the planned Honda Formula 1 team met for a massive 11 hours at Honda's Cricklade factory, near Swindon, England, in the days after the German GP, to make a final decision as to whether or not to go ahead with the plan to enter Grand Prix racing in 1999.

HONDA's decision to stay out of F1 until the year 2000 makes it very likely that Britain's Johnny Herbert will stay at Sauber for one more year.

THE hot rumor in Hungary was that Ralf Schumacher has signed some kind of an agreement with Williams Grand Prix Engineering, where he will partner Alex Zanardi next season. There are suggestions, however, that Ralf first needs to extract himself from his Jordan contract before he is able to switch to Williams.

BRITISH AMERICAN RACING went testing last week at the tiny Welsh airfield racing circuit of Pembrey. The aim of the test was to try out a variety of different liveries to see which ones worked best with TV cameras.

WHILE British American Racing continues to beat the publicity drum at every available opportunity, there is still one major problem to be overcome before the team is up and running in the form that British American Tobacco expect it to be.

AS we predicted a month ago Olivier Panis and Jarno Trulli are to stay with Prost Grand Prix in 1999.

ALAIN PROST says that he is going to announce a major technical restructuring of his team next month.

THE decision to delay Honda's entry into Grand Prix racing until the year 2000 is inconvenient for the team's rising Japanese star Toranosuke Takagi, who has driven remarkably well this year with Tyrrell, although he has been unable to score any good results because the car is simply not fast enough with a Ford customer engine.