Formula One News — September 1999

BENETTON's Director of Operations Joan Villadelprat is to leave Benetton Formula at the end of the season after nine years with the team.

THE Sauber bosses met recently in Switzerland and it seems that Peter Sauber has emerged as the winner of the battle for control of his team.

THE acrimonious takeover battle between French oil companies TotalFina and Elf Aquitaine has ended with an agreement to merge the two companies, with TotalFina boss Thierry Demarest coming out on top and Elf boss Philippe Jaffre departing. The deal has to be agreed by the European Commission but it is expected to go ahead.

THE board of directors of British American Racing is due to meet on October 6 and our spies tell us that there may be an attempt at the meeting to have another management reshuffle.

THE FIA Formula 3000 International Championship came to a close at the Nurburgring with Jason Watt holding off a race-long challenge to beat champion Nick Heidfeld to victory.

THE Jaguar Sport Formula 1 team is already making waves as Jaguar management is beginning its campaign to attract some top names to the team for 2001.

BRITISH AMERICAN RACING has confirmed that Ricardo Zonta will stay with the team next season.

THE announcement that Ricardo Zonta is to be retained by British American Racing comes as a blow to Olivier Panis as the Frenchman had been hoping that British American racing might decide to hire him as Jacques Villeneuve's team-mate.

NICOLA FOULSTON, the boss of Brands Hatch Leisure plc, said the other day the company is no longer interested in acquiring the Silverstone race track and is looking at buying a foreign facility.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER should be back in action in a Ferrari on October 7 when he is scheduled to have another test at the team's Fiorano testing facility.

THE speculation that McLaren boss Ron Dennis and Mansour Ojjeh's TAG Group are planning to buy a substantial shareholding in Bernie Ecclestone's Formula One Holdings increased dramatically last week when it was announced that TAG is selling its remaining shareholding in the TAG Heuer watch company to France's Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy.

MARTIN WHITAKER, the boss of Ford's European motorsport programs, is expected to move away from the Formula 1 program next year although our sources at Ford say that he will retain "a senior position at World Championship level".

DAVID COULTHARD is likely to be told what to do by the McLaren team at the forthcoming European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring as Mika Hakkinen's World Championship challenge has been rather dented as a result of his accident at Monza.

AS we exclusively predicted six weeks ago Prince Malik ado Ibrahim's time as team principal at Arrows has come to an end and he is no longer involved in the decision-making processes of the team.

THE future of the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne has been brought into question by the poor performance of the ruling Liberal Party in Victoria's state elections last weekend.

THE bosses of the world's car manufacturing companies gathered last week at the Frankfurt Motor Show and it is expected that meetings taking place during the show will result in a new round of mergers and takeovers in the industry.

FRENCHMAN racer Laurent Redon has been busy wheeling and dealing in the paddock in recent weeks looking for a way to break into Grand prix racing next year.

AUSTRALIAN Mark Webber says he has the money he needs to secure a test drive with the Jordan team next season and is reported to have severed his links with Mercedes-Benz to make way for a Jordan deal.

THERE was Formula 1 testing last week at Mugello and at Magny-Cours but both were disrupted by poor weather as autumn begins to set in Europe.

THERE have been rumors in recent days in Europe that a second tire manufacturer may be planning to come into Formula 1 in 2001.

THE FIA has circulated all the Formula 1 teams with a new list of dates for the 2000 Formula 1 World Championship and this looks to be very different to the calendar published in July.

THE bosses of the Red Bull Sauber Petronas team will meet this week in Switzerland to decide who really controls the team and it looks like founder Peter Sauber may be struggling for support amongst his partners and backers.

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER is not going to be back in action at the European Grand Prix in two weeks.

OUR spies in Dearborn tell us that Ford is pushing ahead with an ambitious plan to enter a team in Formula 3000 next year to support the Jaguar F1 operation.

ON Tuesday in Frankfurt the Ford Motor Company subsidiary Jaguar Cars will announce that it is entering the Formula 1 World Championship with the renamed Stewart Grand Prix team next year.