Formula One News — June 2009

Turkish GP - Practice 1 Results

Turkish GP - Thursday Press Conference

Tony Maggs, South Africa's first Grand Prix driver, has died from cancer at the age of 72. The son of a war hero, he was expected to work on the family farm in the Zoutpansberg district of the northern Transvaal, close to the border with Mozambique but instead he discovered motor racing with an old Riley.

An organisation called Brabham Grand Prix Team has applied for one of the F1 entries for 2010. The team is headed by German entrepreneur Franz Hilmer, the owner of Formtech GmbH, a machine tool business based in Niederwinkling in Germany.

The ING Renault F1 Team has announced a new partnership with MegaFon, one of Russia™s major telecommunications companies. The agreement sees MegaFon™s branding appear on the drivers™ suits and on the carbon fibre floor (in front of the rear wheels) of the team™s cars at this weekend™s Turkish Grand Prix.

We are in a period of quite extraordinary calm in Formula 1. Nothing much seems to be happening. The Formula 1 teams (at least nine of the 10 members of FOTA) have agreed to enter the World Championship provisionally, based on terms that they wish to dictate before the deadline of June 12.

The new FIA Formula 2 Championship kicked off last weekend in Valencia with Max Mosley in attendance to watch the first two rounds of the series, which was proposed (by him) less than a year ago.

The entries for the 2010 FIA Formula 1 World Championship are now closed and the FIA says that it would "inappropriate" to comment about who these have come from - and even how many entries there are. There are various stories about new teams and it is hard to know what is serious and what is not serious, largely because it is not really clear what rules will be adopted.

The Formula 1 world probably will not have noticed, but General Motors went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday. It is the largest ever industrial bankruptcy in history. The company has assets of $82.29bn and debts of $172.81bn.