Ian Bailey

Finally the F1 debacle has finished and even though last week he claimed not to be standing down, Max Mosley will now be standing for re-election as president of the FIA. I can only see this as a good thing, considering the amount of tinkering he has done over the past few years.

There has been far too much drama in the past few seasons; with all the after race penalties, which seemed to vary in severity for very similar offences. Then there is the HUGE change this season in all the aerodynamics etc etc, which has caused its own fair chunk of criticism from fans and teams alike (gotta love the double diffuser). Then there was the bomb shell of the budget cap, as we know has caused a large rift between FOTA and the FIA for going on three months now. He has been involved in controversy since 1993 when he was elected to replace Jean-Marie Balestre, but finally, it will come to an end, or will it? He has said he’s going to resign several times before and never did, so we’ll see.

In the meantime, he’s a list of possible candidates to fill Max Mosleys shoes as the president of the FIA.

Jean Todt
Although he has had a rather large involvement (no sarcasm!) with Ferrari in the past, reading around the web, the general concensus seems to think that Mr Todt will become the next president. He stood down recently as Ferrari executive director, so should really have no “job” at the moment. He also has a large amount of experience, having been involved in motor racing himself, as well as management.

Ron Dennis
Ron is in a similar situation to Jean Todt, having stepped down from his role in McLaren recently. I think Ron is a bit too outspoken to become the next president and has rather personal ties to McLaren to make him a neutral contender.

Sir Jackie Stewart
Sir Jackies name has cropped up several times in my research and he would be an admirable choice. The only problem with Sir Jackie is that he’s getting on, as he turned 70 this year. He also has a large back catalogue of experience in racing, team management and with other organisations, as he is the patron of many.

Ari Vatanen
Another contender who would be well suited is Ari. He was involved in Rally Driving from 1974 to 1998, so has many years experience as a driver and went through some radical changes in the sport himself during that time (various class changes). But more recently, he has turned into a politician and has been a Member of the European Parliament since 1999. He has the political and driving background that Max had when he was appointed, so maybe he might be a good choice.

Tony Purnell
An unusual choice and probably one not many have heard of. Tony Purnell originally worked with Jaguar and then Red Bull when they took over the team. He was removed as team principal in 2005 and replaced by Christian Horner. Since then he has been working at the FIA as a technical consultant, so maybe this is the springboard he needs.

Other notable names:

• Damon Hill
• Alexander Wurz
• Paul Stoddart
• Michael Schumacher
• Dave Richards

Most probable though, Max will go back on his word and be elected for another term!!! Any thoughts on who you think would be a good contender and why?

The list of entrants for next year’s Formula One season has been announced, and can be seen here.

Two of the new names surprise me a little, CAMPOS GRAND PRIX (Campos Meta racing, see post here) and MANOR GRAND PRIX.

I can see why they included CAMPOS, mainly because they are a based in Spain, so it adds another country onto the list of entrants. Considering there are two races in Spain, it should make more people come watch the races.

MANOR GRAND PRIX though, confused me. After a little Googling, I believe they are MANOR MOTORSPORT (wikipedia), whom are currently an F3 Euroseries team. Although there is not actually anything on their site saying they have entered (here), that said, they weren’t even on the article about new teams on F1.com. I believe they will be headed up by John Booth, who currently heads the F3 team, and Nick Wirth, who is a former owner of the Simtek Formula One team and a former aerodynamicist and chief designer for the Benetton

They have some pedigree about them, as some notable names have driven for them, most notably, Lewis Hamilton in 2004. Lucas Di Grassi raced for them in 2005 and Kazuki Nakajima in 2006. They have also won quite a few races, but no championships in the division.

I’m not sure if this is the same team and will update this as I find more info, mainly because the F3 car uses a Mercedes engine and apparently the F1 car will be using a Cosworth engine. Interesting.

They seem to be teamed with Manor Competition, link, which is a Formula Renault UK team. These guys have been competing for a long time and have quite a good list of names that have driven for them: Lewis Hamilton, Kimi Raikkonen, Jason Plato and Antonio Pizzonia.

The team has been running since 1990, and is the most successful team in history of the Formula Renault UK Championship. There is more history on their website, so go take a look.

Update: More information about the new teams can be found on the FIA website, located here. Thanks to Gary Mason for the link.

Kinetic Energy Recovery System… any idea what that means? If not, don’t worry, you are joined by quite a lot of fans in F1, who also find it confusing!

The KERS system was introduced in 2009 as part of the new rule changes and from the start there were mixed signals over its advantages. The only teams to have even bothered experimenting with it this season are McLaren, Ferrari, BMW and Renault, funnily enough, some of the biggest teams in F1.

The whole idea behind introducing KERS was basically to make it look like F1 were becoming green – “look at us, we can save energy under braking and then use it later!”. Unfortunately, most of the teams didn’t even bother researching into it.

The idea behind KERS is that the kinetic energy that is created under braking is stored for use later, rather than being dissipated via heat. The methods for storing it involve using a large battery, which can then be activated to output upto 80HP of extra power into the rear axle and enable the user to have a boost.

A good example was this weekend, at the Turkish Grand Prix in Istanbul. Rubens Barrichello, after his dismal start, was left stuck behind Heikki Kovalainen in the McLaren. Even though the Brawn GP car is a much better designed car than the MP4-24, Rubens found it impossibly hard to get around Heikki. A classic example of KERS was at the end of a lap, Rubens managed to slide past Heikki, but in no time at all, Heikki could just power past him on the straight using his slipstream and the extra 80 HP from the KERS system.

The major problem with KERS is it’s weight. I believe it weighs around 60 KG, which is 10% of the minimum weight of the car, which is 605 kg (1334 lb) including the driver, fluids and on-board cameras. The problem with this is that teams tend to use ballast to change the balance of the car (some cars weight as little as 450KG on their own), but with KERS being on a car, this can affect the balance changing power of the team quite a lot.

Now, it seems that the Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) are going to scrap KERs from the end of this season, which means even though they are trying to save money, they have just wasted a vast amount researching and developing the product in the first place! I can understand that Ferrari and McLaren are going to be rather annoyed with this, but at least next season they can spend more of their time trying to develop a competitive car!

Spain’s Epsilon Euskadi has become the latest team to confirm that it has sent in an entry receipt for the Formula One World Championship in 2010.

I have to say this isn’t a team name I recognise, although, for some reason, the Euskadi part seems familiar, either way, a bit of background information about them:

The team is based in Spain and the team headquarters are located in Azkoitia. They already have a manufacturing facility, wind tunnels, autoclaves etc, which means they are a step ahead of Team Superfund, who will have to share facilities until they develop their own.

The team is headed up by Joan Villadelprat and Sergio Rinland, who both have many years of experience in F1 with Ferrari, McLaren, Benetton and Tyrell. So they have some pedigree in the sport. Apparently they also have financial backing to compete in the next four seasons of F1 if their application is accepted.

Currently they are competing in the World Series by Renault, of which they won the Drivers and Constructors World Championship in 2005 with a certain Robert Kubica racing for them. They also competed in LeMans in 2008, fielding two teams driving their own developed cars.

They also have a decent website located here, which will have more information on it!

It’s been announced that a few more teams have entered into the F1 2010 season, LiteSpeed GP, Campos Meta Racing and Team Superfund. Doing a quick google, you will discover these teams don’t even have a homepage that is highly ranked, so who are they?

Let’s start in reverse, with Team Superfund. The team is backed solely by Austrian businessman Christian Baha and will be managed by former Williams, Benetton and Honda test driver, Alexander Wurz (wikipedia). A step in the right direction for Alex maybe? A few former F1 drivers have had success in management, most recently, Gehard Bergher at Torro Rosso, before he sold his shares back. The Team Superfund cars will potentially be using the Cosworth Engine and rumours are they will be sharing technology with a UK competitor before establishing they own facilities if the venture works.

Team Superfund have had a sponsorship venture into the sport for a few years, sponsoring Spyker in 2007 for example, but this will be their first physical venture into the sport.

Campos Meta Racing is a combination of the Campos Racing team using the Meta Image. The team will be managed by former F1 driver, Adrian Campos (wikipedia). More recently, Campos Racing has been a GP2 team, called Campos Grand Prix, and won the constructors championship in 2008 with drivers Vitaly Petrov, Lucas Di Grassi and Ben Hanley. So this shows their pedigree, but will they have the facilities and drivers (of which we know nothing), to make the step up to formula one?

LiteSpeed GP is a Formula 3 team that are finally making the big jump up to formula one. The team is owned by Nino Singh Judge and Steve Kenchington. They don’t have any championship victories under their belt, but they have developed their own car from scratch and are currently competing in the 2009 championship, although they aren’t doing fantastic. Their F3 car currently uses a Mugen Honda engine, so maybe this could be a way back into the sport for Honda, as an engine supplier rather than a team, which could pave the way back when the financial crisis resides.

A small update has been made to twitter. As you can tell from the title, it relates to the @reply functionality. They have now made it so you won’t see @replies when users you are following @reply to users you aren’t following. You will still see @replies that are between two people you are following.

This might cut down the big spam for those following loads of people – but I think it will cut down half of the social discovery on twitter! I quite enjoy being nosey at conversations and who they are between etc but ah well.

I heard on the radio this morning an age old debate about that ISPs should police their users browsing/downloading habits to stop pirates and reduce piracy. It’s been around for ages and was partly the reason why ISPs introduced bandwidth throttling and usage caps. But now it seems the entertainment industry lobbyists want the government to force ISPs to disconnect repeated copyright infringers!

As we all know, the movie and digital music industries are booming, but apparently, if ISPs don’t crack down on users, these industries will also possibly lose many jobs!. Oh noes! I was reading an article on TorrentFreak, which also had a funny stat, here is the extract:

“The coalition’s recommendations are accompanied by some impressive statistics for which no source can be found. They argue that a massive 50% of all Internet traffic can be attributed to piracy alone.”

50%! Bit excessive, especially as earlier I was informed of some stats from BBC iPlayer, which can be seen here

An extract from that article:

“I think that at the moment, just for streaming, iPlayer uses about 60Gbps of bandwidth (that’s about 7.5GB downloaded every second) in an evening peak. I think about 15Gbps for downloads and about 1.5Gbps for iPhone. So overall on a particular peak day we may hit 100Gbps (about 12.5GB per second) although typically it’ll be somewhat less than that. That turns out to be up to 7PB of data transfer a month. ”

7. Peta. Bytes. 50% of internet traffic is piracy? Then the other 50% must be BBC iPlayer!

On a side note I’ve just looked at the BBC Site and noticed the ISPs have rejected the proposal. Article here. Apparently the umbrella group that represents ISPs said disconnecting users would be a “disproportionate response”.

It will be interesting to see how this one unfolds. Although I don’t really expect much to change!

Just had this problem, but its actually incredibly easy to solve, so thought i’d post an article on here incase anyone else has this problem.

It’s quite simple really and there is a couple of examples below for T-SQL and MySQL. I’ve only used the T-SQL one in SQL Server 2005.

SELECT TOP X fieldName FROM tableName ORDER BY NEWID()

SELECT fieldName FROM tableName ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT X

field Name / table Name should be obvious replacements, if not, here is an example of the code I used.

SELECT TOP 1 Campaigns.ID, Campaigns.StartDate, Campaigns.EndDate FROM Campaigns
WHERE (Campaigns.StartDate < GETDATE() AND Campaigns.EndDate > GETDATE())
ORDER BY NEWID()

Hope this helps someone, enjoy!

Fortunately, Donington Park now has until the end of June to satisfy planners over the various upgrades it needs to fulfill requirements to stage the 2010 British Grand Prix. This is good news from the perspective of British motorsport fans and motorsport in Europe in general, as losing the British Grand Prix would be catastrophic.

The British Grand Prix in its wholesome self (various tracks) has been running since around 1926. In that time it has been at several tracks, listed below with years (thanks to wikipedia):

While in recent years there has been the addition of races in many new countries, such as Abu Dhabi (new this year), Istanbul in Turkey and Shanghai in China to name a few, it would be a tragedy to lose a British Grand Prix that is currently one of the oldest standing races in Formula One history, along with Germany, France and Italy.

It will be interesting to see if Simon Gillett manages to get it ready in 12months and what he will do to the circuit to get it up to Bernie Ecclestones incredibly high standards. The starting point is making the track generally wider, upgrading pit lane facilities, grandstands and general facilities. Will £100m be enough? Considering Wembley took £700m and they are still having problems. Hopefully he will keep some of the great parts of the circuit such as Craner Curves and The Old Hairpin, as remember, Donington did once host a (typically wet) Grand Prix in 1993, which was won by Ayrton Senna.

Looking at Donington on Wikipedia puts numbers into perspective. The track was built in 1931 for £12,000 and now, 2009, it needs a £100,000,000 revamp!

Either way, it should be a fantastic event at Silverstone this year and I am fortunate enough to have tickets for the 3 day event, so expect some photos on the Blog on the Monday after and possibly some tweets during! I have to say thankyou to my lovely Fiancee for tickets as it will be an event to remember.

Lola, Prodrive and US Grand Prix Engineering are looking at entering the 2010 season after the FIA announced a proposed £30million cap on teams budgets (unless it gets revised, which no doubt it will).

The £30million budget cap will provide smaller teams the ability to still produce a competitive, as they will have a slightly different “rule book” to the larger manufacturer teams.

-Edit: This has recently been announced as a £40million cap – although most teams are contesting this and many may refuse to even enter next year (Ferrari, Toyota, Red Bull)

These include the following:

• A different (but standard) under body
• Movable wings
• No engine rev limit
• No restriction on the number or type of updates
• No homologation requirements
• No limits on materials
• No restrictions on testing

Some of these are major changes, which are designed to make less developed cars still competitive. I’m not sure if it will work, as I think there is the problem of them becoming too competitive and the larger manufacturers just leaving altogether or joining the budget cap. It’s designed to make a level playing field, but I think it may have the opposite effect, only time will tell. But no doubt Bernie and Max will carry on tweaking it all no end. sigh.

As for these teams, USGPE are formally USF1, but they had to change from this name due to Bernie owning the term F1. The team is fronted by Haas CNC Racing technical director Ken Anderson and journalist Peter Windsor, so the chances are you probably haven’t heard of them before.

Prodrive should be a common name for any motor sport fan, as they have worked with the Subaru WRC team for a long time and have their fingers in some other motor sports as well. They are owned by Dave Richards, who is also the chairman of Aston Martin. Aston should be a household name for nearly everyone these days, considering they are iconic in the auto industry; the bond films probably helped a little bit too! It would be interesting to see how these guys cope and where they source their engines etc from, early sources are indicating they might do something with Cosworth, which would be a welcome return!

Lola are another team the hardcore motorsport fans would remember, as they have had a stint in F1 in the past, leaving the sport in the 1990′s due to costs and competitiveness (or lack of). They have since been working in other leagues, such as Le Mans, which they have won several times. For us UK residents, it is yet another UK based team to support, as I believe all their facilities are based in Cambridgeshire.

Either way, exciting prospects for next year… that is unless Bernie introduces his medal system, but don’t get me started on that.