Thursday, April 30, 2015

provisional 2016 calendar


 It was at that point that apparently leaked versions of the provisional race schedule for next year, featuring an unprecedented 21 grands prix, began to do the rounds. One version, published by Italy’s La Gazzetta dello Sport, shows the addition of Azerbaijan and the return of Germany, and multiple ’back-to-back’ race weekends including Australia and China in early April . The Malaysia GP takes a place at the end of calendar for a logical chain with Singapore while the Russia GP migrates early in the season . Note , finally , that there is no more than 4 weeks holiday in August but just 3, if this calendar is accepted .

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

A few news




















I/ ValenciaGP back in 2016 ? : the ARC Resorts Company, based in Singapore, would be willing to invest the necessary 600 million of euros to make formula 1 come back in Valencia. Their goal is to open a six star palace , also a Yacht club, a golf course , a shopping centre and a place dedicated to concerts or even a casino as in Monaco.
The aim would be to promote the formula 1, but also the new formula e.

II/ Luca di Montezemolo believes that the current priority , in F1 , is to reduce costs to help small teams and also to increase the number of spectators on the circuit and in front of their television. If he still supports Ecclestone, di Montzemolo asserts that "he needs experts advices from the world of finance, marketing and digital."

III/ Pirelli tyres for the four next races : medium and hard for Barcelona ; soft and supersoft for Monaco , Canada and Austria


Bahrain GP : race report

FERNANDO ALONSO : “This wasn’t the easiest race for us. We weren’t very competitive at the beginning, then we had a few issues with the aero behaviour of the car, which slowed me down in the middle stint, but I was able to push a bit harder on the soft tyre at the end of the race. We still need to learn a lot more about this car in order to extract its maximum, but an afternoon like today was extremely useful for us as it enabled us to better understand the car.“It was a useful race for me too: my longest stint during winter testing was 12 laps; in Malaysia, I did 22; and here I completed the race, so this is a step forward. Hopefully, we can improve again for Bahrain.”

JENSON BUTTON : “Today wasn’t too bad – we’re still fighting at the back of the field, which is a shame, but it’s positive to see that we’re progressing. My middle stint on the Option tyre wasn’t too bad – I don’t think our pace was too bad at all on the softer tyre – but the Prime was a bit trickier in those closing laps. A lot of that was due to all the blue flags and traffic I encountered – they meant the tyre temperatures dropped off quite a bit through the stint. It wasn’t easy. Regarding the collision with Pastor, I thought there was room on the inside – a collision is something you never want to see happen. It was just a misjudgment, I guess. Still, we go to Bahrain hoping for more progress, although the circuit configuration doesn’t suit us, so heading to Europe will hopefully work out a little bit better for the team. We need to improve at every race because we’re quite a way back.”

ERIC BOULLIER : “First, it’s a real positive for the entire team that we managed to get two cars to the finish with no issues whatsoever during the race. I think that’s a great reward for Honda, and we should congratulate them – today’s double-finish is the result of an enormous amount of hard work, much of which goes unappreciated, so I want to personally thank everybody working in Woking, Sakura and Milton Keynes for their efforts. It’s great that we’re starting to make solid progress. Second, our race pace showed further improvement: Jenson drove strongly in the middle stint, and Fernando was reasonably quick relative to the others in the final stint. Fighting towards the back of the pack still isn’t where we want to be. We know we’re not in a position to fight for points yet – but, little by little, we’re getting there. And we must keep pushing to ensure there are improvements coming for every race.”

YASUHISA ARAI : “After today’s result, it finally feels like we’ve left this long period of winter testing behind us, and started the season proper. To get both cars to the finish of the race is one more item off our list, and we’ll now continue to push forward race by race to achieve the targets that we’ve set for ourselves. It may appear that we’ve only achieved a minor objective, and we know there’s a lot of work ahead, but the whole team deserves credit and thanks for all of their hard work.”

Bahrain GP : the race

Bahrain GP : qualifications report

JENSON BUTTON : “I guess we hoped we might be just a bit closer than we were today; in practice, we’d looked a bit more competitive, certainly. We’d found a reasonably good balance with the car, in fact, but the lap-time isn’t quite there yet. In addition, the cars in front of us seemed to make a big leap forward this afternoon – whereas we didn’t – so we’ll need to find out why that was. So, overall, we’ve made some improvements this weekend, but qualifying just didn’t go our way. Hopefully, things will be better tomorrow, and we’ll be able to race some of the cars that will start in front of us on the grid."

FERNANDO ALONSO : “We were two tenths away from the mid-pack – and close to getting into Q2 – today. We’re getting there, and this is another step forward, but we’re still under-performing, so we need to keep improving. Our main priority now is to finish tomorrow’s race; that’ll allow us to learn more about the car and uncover any possible problems. Obviously, two DNFs in Malaysia wasn’t an ideal situation for us, so, regardless of the result, we need to make the finish here in China. This has been another positive weekend – everyone in the team is excited about the progress we’re making.”

ERIC BOULLIER : “I’d hesitate to use the word ‘disappointing’ to describe this afternoon’s qualifying performance, but I think we’d all hoped for a little more, particularly after looking like we’d made a respectable improvement in all three of this weekend’s practice sessions. Fernando’s afternoon was obviously affected by the car failure on his out-lap in FP3 this morning, but he responded magnificently, and the parity between our drivers today demonstrated exactly why we hired them: because they can get absolutely everything from the car, and leave nothing out on track. Superbe ! Additionally, both Fernando and Jenson know how important it will be to finish tomorrow’s race. Hopefully, it will give us another opportunity to narrow the gap to the cars in front. In fact, while today’s grid positions of 17th and 18th don’t necessarily reflect it, this weekend does indeed mark another step forward: in Australia we were 2.836s off the best Q1 time; in Malaysia the gap was 2.367s, and here it was 1.774s. That gives everyone in the team reason to feel encouraged.”

YASUHISA ARAI : “In FP3 we had a small ignition system issue on Fernando’s car, so we couldn’t ride the momentum that we’d gathered during yesterday’s positive FP1 and FP2 sessions. It’s an unfortunate result, especially since we’d been closing the gap. I want to say a big thank-you to all the mechanics for their hard work to get Fernando’s car ready for qualifying. And we hope that the race tomorrow will bring us some positive results.”

Bahrain GP : qualifications

Bahrain GP : FP1 & FP2 report

JENSON BUTTON : “I guess it wasn’t a great day, but at least we got a lot of useful data on the car. The slightly frustrating thing, though, is that both cars were set up quite differently today, to get comparative aero info, and we weren’t really able to benefit from that on my car. Hopefully, we won’t have further issues; that way, I can get some decent running tomorrow so as to see what the car is doing. Whatever happens, though, it’s not going to be an easy weekend. We knew that already. And qualifying will undoubtedly be tricky again!”

FERNANDO ALONSO : “Today I had a very smooth day, and I was happy with the car in every condition, so tomorrow we just need to make sure we optimise the performance of the car and try to get a good result. Still, today is only Friday, and we saw in Shanghai that we had a decent performance on the Friday but then not so good on the Saturday – due to the fact other people were running more fuel than us on the Friday. Even so, we can see that we’re getting closer and closer to the mid-pack with every race. Definitely we’re moving in the right direction, we just need to do it that bit quicker! We don’t have any ‘magic bullets’ here, since we’re only four days after the last race, but we have some little tweaks that are putting some performance in the car. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the same for Jenson today, so we’re missing some information, but we’ll try to recover tomorrow.”

ERIC BOULLIER : “Today, to quote that hackneyed footballing proverb, was for McLaren-Honda a game of two halves.“On the one hand, Fernando enjoyed a trouble-free morning followed by an equally unproblematic afternoon, running through his planned programme without mishap. On the other, Jenson was forced to endure a frustrating day, the result of not one but two major interruptions, compromising his ability to complete satisfactorily not only FP1 but also FP2. We apologise to him for that. Even so, we’ve gathered valuable data, which our engineers will study this evening and tonight. It’s too early to say where we are, pace-wise, but Fernando’s best FP2 lap-time was 1.5s off Nico’s [Rosberg] FP2 benchmark. That isn’t where we want to be; having said that, I believe it demonstrates that our progress, although not always linear, is nonetheless directionally positive overall.”

YASUHISA ARAI : “Today, Fernando’s FP1 and FP2 running programmes were completed as planned, and we were more or less able to set the driveability control on the power unit. As for Jenson’s power unit issues, we were limited on running time owing to an electrical shutdown in FP1. We were able to put the car back on the track for FP2, but the control data that monitors the power unit status was unstable and we had to bring the car back to the garage several times, which was unfortunate.We’ll need to utilise tomorrow’s FP3 to set the control data for qualifying.”