Helmut Marko Charms - My way or the highway !

The head of the Red Bull programme is Helmut Marko, who Vergne said has a justifiable image as a very tough and no-nonsense, old school character.

“When I started in Formula 3, he called me and said: Ricciardo has shown you how to do it. If you don’t win the championship, you can leave.”

Vergne also recalls another phone call with Marko, “I was starting on pole and eventually I won that race, but Marko thought it was unacceptable that I had not also taken the fastest lap. That’s just how he is.”

Sebastian Vettel said recently that Marko is “tough” but also “straightforward”, while Daniil Kvyat said the Austrian’s contribution to many drivers’ careers is obvious.

“I was maybe three or four seconds off in my first wet test in Formula BMW and he called me at 7am and said: So you’re quite useless in the wet. Then he just hung up,” the Russian recalled.

Penske’s purchase of Indianapolis Motor Speedway - More details are emerging.

Roger Penske’s purchase of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the IndyCar Series and IMS Productions was a big shock in the IndyCar world but more details are emerging that may help to explain what happened.

The current owners - the George Family - seems to have decided to divest itself its original assets following the death a year ago of family matriarch Mari Hulman George. They sold the family’s $80 million baking powder business, known as Clabber Girl, back in May and the word from US is that they commissioned the secretive investment bank Allen & Company to find buyers for their racing properties. The bank is reported to have approached Liberty Media and the related but independent Liberty Global, which is the biggest shareholder in Formula E. Both organisations are controlled by John Malone but operate independently of one another.

Sources suggest that Tony George was uneasy about selling to either entity because he feared that they would not respect the heritage of the sport and so he approached Roger Penske at the final round of the IndyCar Series at Laguna Seca in September.

Selling to Liberty Media made a great deal of sense for them because it offered the potential for the company to rapidly build up F1 in the United States by being able to extract existing races from the IndyCar schedule and switch them to F1, without having to go through the complex processes of setting up new races.

A deal could, for example, have given Liberty Media immediate access to the Indianapolis Grand Prix (on the infield road course used by F1 between 2000 and 2007. It could also have meant a deal with Long Beach to run F1 around the streets there, with other potential switches in places such as Detroit and Toronto. The key question, of course, is whether this was a cost-effective solution with the right destinations, or whether Liberty would prefer to build its own events. The danger for IndyCar would be that stripping out such events would weaken the series, which struggles to make money and so getting Roger Penske involved was a logical step as he has a great deal to lose if IndyCar is weakened.

Liberty Media is not saying anything about what happened but the sale can perhaps be seen as a defensive action from Penske, which he is now in the process of turning into an opportunity.

Both Hulman & Company and the Penske Corporation are privately-held and so there has been no public discussion about the sale price, although some reports in the US have suggested that Penske could have paid as much as $400 million.

Other stories suggest that Penske is not going to have risked such large sums and that there may be others involved with him in the purchase (including George himself). There have been suggestions that John Menard, the billionaire owner of a chain of home improvement stores, and a Penske sponsor in IndyCar, may also be involved in the deal.

Source: Joe Saward's Business of Motorsport Newsletter

Clever request from Red Bull Racing !

The Formula 1 cars of today are incredibly complex pieces of equipment. They are hard to understand - and even harder to police. However, the teams watch one another like hawks and when a team gains a dramatic advantage, this will show up on the GPS data and the rival teams will then try to analyse what is going on.

On Saturday morning in Austin, the FIA issued a technical directive - the 35th of the year - giving details of a system that Red Bull Racing had proposed that might have allowed the team to race more than the permitted fuel flow. This was rejected by the FIA as being clearly illegal.

Red Bull will have known this in advance and so it is clear that the purpose the request was to get a ruling from the FIA not for a system that Red Bull wanted to use, but rather one that the team believed a rival was using. This is an elegant way to stop dubious systems being run, without the need for any public fighting, which is on no real value to the sport.

The Red Bull request related to a system by which the team was able to use more fuel than is allowed under the fuel flow regulations, but working around (or disrupting) the ultrasonic pulses sent by the fuel flow metering units, which measure fuel consumption over the course of a race and peak consumption. However, the measurement is not constant, but rather done by intermittent sampling. In theory, therefore, teams can use more fuel between each sampling, or can use aliasing techniques which mean that signals can become indistinguishable. There is no doubt that this is illegal and Red Bull will have known that in advance, but it does provide a way for the team to get an FIA ruling that will stop such activity. Using more fuel than the allowed fuel flow could create a situation in which a team could be able to burn more fuel at critical points during a race weekend, giving an engine extra power when accelerating at low speeds, which would then allow the car to carry more speed as the car accelerates and consequently produce a higher top speed.

The use of aliasing is a very complex subject, which is why reports have been confused, but raising fuel flow between the ultrasonic pulses might (theoretically) be possible, or aliasing could cause an effect similar to the optical illusion seen with film when frames captured by a camera are not sufficiently fast to capture a wheel’s true rotation, which then gives the impression that the wheel is turning backwards , or more slowly than it actually is.

Red Bull was clearly of the opinion that one of its rivals might have been using such a system.

It was thus quite a coincidence that Ferrari’s performance dived in the race in Austin, immediately after the directive came out.

Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto clearly understood what people were thinking and spoke out about suggestions that the directive had had an impact on the performance of the cars.

“I heard comments at the end of the race, which I find very disappointing,” he said. “It’s not good for the sport and I think everybody should be a bit more cautious.”

Binotto said that the Ferraris had been competitive in the qualifying session, but had failed for different reasons in the race, resulting in Charles Leclerc finishing 50s behind winner Valtteri Bottas in the race.

The F1 circus will be watching to see what happens in Brazil at the end of next week.

Source : JSBL