Formula One News — February 2002

The Kirch Group has appointed three insolvency experts to help it through its current crisis.

The race to be the first Middle Eastern country to host a World Championship Grand Prix is now on and despite Beirut having been talking about the idea for five years, it looks like Bahrain is going to get there first.

Two years ago Orange launched its three-year sponsorship deal of Arrows with team boss Tom Walkinshaw making some fairly radical claims.

It is nearly three years since Don Panoz acquired G Force and Van Diemen in order to expand his racing activities.

Keith Wiggins, once the boss of the Pacific Grand Prix team, has taken another old F1 man across the Atlantic to be team manager of Herdez Competition.

The international automobile federation had a near-miss last night, according to police reports from Geneva.

Jaguar Racing's Eddie Irvine was one of the presenters at the annual Brit Awards in London, presenting Australian Kylie Minogue with an award for the Best International Album in 2001.

The organizers of the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne are always full of good ideas and to help promote the race this year they have decided to use four "big heads": Michael and Ralf Schumacher, David Coulthard and Juan Pablo Montoya.

As we exclusively predicted yesterday Stephane Sarrazin has been named Toyota's test driver for the coming season, alongside Australian Ryan Briscoe.

Formula 1's television viewing figures for 2001 have now been made public and the total for the year is 54,477,361,661.

As we exclusively predicted a couple of weeks ago Deutsche Post is to take over the title sponsorship of the Jordan team with its DHL courier company expected to be given the naming rights for the next three years.

Jos Verstappen was in Switzerland for a seat fitting at Sauber on Thursday and has been offered the chance to test for the team.

As expected, Jordan announced international carrier DHL as its title sponsor at the launch of the new EJ12 in a Brussels airport hangar on Friday.

There was not much surprising about the launch of the DHL Jordan Honda team in a hangar at Brussels Airport - a DHL hub - except that there was very little in the way of backing from Benson & Hedges and am awful lot of support from DHL and its parent company Deutsche Post.

According to The Financial Times in London, sports are going to struggle to match the revenues of recent years from television companies.

McLaren and Williams were the last two teams to finish preseason testing of their new designs at Valencia on Friday.

While Jordan was getting much attention in Brussels for the launch of the EJ12, the KL Minardi Asiatech team launched their 2002 championship contender in Kuala Lumpur.

Volkswagen AH has announced that it is going to be stopping production at five of its factories over the Easter holiday period because of the drop in demand for new cars.

There are rumors in France that former Prost Grand Prix test driver Stephane Sarrazin may get a full-time job this year as a test driver with Toyota Motorsport.

Alex Zanardi is continuing his recovery and is now using artificial legs although he admits that some days are harder than others and he struggles to use the legs all the time.

Testing in Silverstone moved to the shorter National circuit for its final day on Thursday, where rain prevented dry running in the afternoon.

Mercedes-Benz is to expand its efforts to support young drivers with plans to run a Formula 3 engine in Germany this season.

Bernie Ecclestone says that his family has not made any offer to buy back the shares of SLEC which are owned by Kirch Media.

Frank Williams says that he is still interested in the career of Jenson Button - even if the youngster had a difficult year in 2001.

The commercial rights for Formula 1 are up for sale.