Formula One News — January 2009

Silverstone has announced that is has signed a five-year deal to host the British Motorcycle Grand Prix from 2010 onwards. The series was previously holding it races at Donington Park, but the deal for the British Grand Prix to move to the Leicestershire track has opend the way for Silverstone to take over the motorcycles.

Ferrari has unveiled its 2009 Formula 1 challenger at Mugello, near Florence. The car is named the F60 to celebrate the company's 60th year of Formula 1 competition, which predates the World Championship, which began only in the summer of 1950.

The BRM name is to be revived in 2009, the 60th anniversary of the celebrated racing name entering the sport. British Racing Motors was the brainchild of Raymond Mays - who had been the major force behind English Racing Automobiles (ERA) in the 1930s.

The suggestion that there could be a management buyout at Honda Racing F1 is a very logical one and probably the easiest solution to Honda's problem. Closing down the team would be a major blow to Honda's image.

Scuderia Toro Rosso has announced that Sebastien Buemi will drive for the team in the 2009 Formula 1 season. The twenty year old from Aigle, Switzerland competed in GP2 last year, when he was also the reserve driver for Red Bull Racing.

Petty Enterprises has closed its doors and laid off its staff but the Petty name will live on in NASCAR thanks to a deal that has been struck between Boston Ventures, the owners of Petty Holdings, Gillett Evernham Motorsport (GEM) and Richard Petty himself.

The city of Rovaniemi, the capital of the Finnish province of Lapland, claims to be Santa Claus's home town. It has an average temperature of 0-degrees and snow is on the ground for six months a year. The lowest temperature ever recorded there was in January 1999 when it got down to a brisk -47.5-deg C.

There is no shortage of test tracks in Spain and Portugal, indeed the major problem now that F1 teams are not going to be testing in-season is that these tracks all need to find alternative sources of income.

David Pitchforth, once the principal of Jaguar Racing in F1, has been named as the new boss of a company to be called Boeing UK Rotorcraft Support, which will consolidate the company's helicopter service businesses in Britain.

Donington Park has been granted planning permission to make the changes necessary to become a Formula 1 circuit. The North-West Leicestershire District Council agreed to the proposals put forward and the circuit can now go ahead with the plans to build.

The FOTA Executive Committee met today at Heathrow to further progress the cost-reducing initiatives already discussed in Monte Carlo in December. All the members unanimously agreed a number of important principles and signed a comprehensive aerodynamic testing restrictions agreement.

The Formula 1 team principals are meeting today at a Heathrow Hotel to discuss more details of the cost-cutting plans that were agreed in December. One of the major aims today will be to work out an equivalency formula between restrictions on the use of wind tunnels and on computational fluid dynamics.

The North West Leicestershire District Council will today rule on planning proposals for the upgrading of the Donington Park racing circuit in order to bring it up to the standard required for Formula 1. The circuit intends to host the British Grand Prix in 2010 and Simon Gillett, the chief executive of Donington Ventures Leisure Ltd, says he is expecting to get the go-ahead to build and reckons that the work will be completed in around 10 months.

US automobile sales dived by 36% in December, compared to a year ago, maintaining the disastrous trend of recent months, which has hit the car industry across the world. The latest figures reveal that the industry had its worst year since 1992 and the December figures were shocking for several firms, notably Chrysler, which saw its sales drop 53%.

Eleven drivers have thus far signed up to compete in the new FIA Formula 2 Championship and they come from an eclectic background as it is not yet clear where the new series will fit into the existing structures of international single-seater racing.

There has been much reporting in the last day or so which suggests that the team formerly known as Honda Racing F1 is close to a deal to use Ferrari engines in 2009. This is not as clear-cut as some of the stories have suggested.

Formula 3 Euroseries champions ART Grand Prix (which has won the title for the last five seasons in its different guises) has announced that it will be running four cars as usual in 2009.

Former McLaren head of race engineering Steve Hallam is now settling into his new role as Director of Competition at Michael Waltrip Racing in Charlotte, North Carolina. Hallam spent 27 years in Formula 1 before deciding to try something new.

The British tabloid press is known for its desire to titillate its readership - as the F1 world has discovered in graphic terms in the course of the last year. The "red tops" have therefore been enjoying the goings-on of an employment tribunal in Southampton.

Sebastien Buemi is the next driver in the Red Bull Junior "production line" and thus it has long been expected that he would be one of the drivers with Scuderia Toro Rosso in 2009. The 20-year-old Swiss racer has already done two seasons in GP2 and has been testing for Red Bull Racing for more than a year.

Formula 1 teams have been busily building their new cars and the first of the new 2009 cars is expected to be unveiled next week when Ferrari takes the covers off its new challenger at Fiorano on Monday morning (January 12).

Ferrari sources say that rumours linking the company's development of KERS with the Peugeot sportscar team are not to be taken seriously. The stories, which seem to have begun in the United States, suggest that Peugeot will run the Ferrari F1 KERS system on a 908 development car.

Carlin Motorsport has announced that it is switching to Volkswagen engines in Formula 3 for 2009, following the announcement that it has signed two Red Bull Junior drivers. All the Red Bull Formula 3 drivers in 2009 will run with VW power.

One intriguing rumour to surface over the Christmas period is the suggestion that Honda Racing F1's Ross Brawn may have been talking seriously to Michael Schumacher about working together to save the Brackley team.

These are difficult times for the motorsport world. Consumer confidence around the world has been shaken by the financial chaos that has occurred since the credit crunch. The International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn says that 2009 will be a "very dark" year unless governments do more to get economies moving again.