Bob Barnard Track Engineering

Well is seems the summer season has woken up and we have some news to comment on. Casey Stoner is off to Honda next year in MotoGP, not a surprise really, and the other shoe to drop will be Rossi to Ducati to get away from Lorenzo.

Over at F1 at Silverstone the HRT Team have put Yamamoto in to replace Bruno Senna, only for this race they say, and only for money is what they are not saying. Yamamoto has raced in F1 before but made such an impression I cannot remember. In practice he is was not the slowest, but only because Trulli's Lotus broke after three laps! Red Bull have led both sessions today with Vettel quickest in the morning and Webber this afternoon. Times are all over the place with Ferrari struggling in the morning and second fastest in the afternoon. Teams working out the new layout. Eddie Oliver, you mentioned the bike times were slower than the simulation, can you tell us how much? It would be interesting to know the prediction for the F1 cars. Drivers not saying too much about the new section, mainly worried about the high curbs at the Maggotts/Becketts complex and are asking for them to be removed. I can understand why being a really high speed corner, and that style of curb is used for slow chicanes. Why would you put those in and why did the FIA OK them? Nice quote in one report that Rosberg was half a second quicker than his "elderly" team mate!

Bernie is calling for tire with a maximum life of 100km so the cars have to stop twice and spice up the show. You know my thoughts on that sort of idea, a circus is entertaining but that is not what we are running here. Seems that Bernie did not keep his mates at the FIA informed of the deal in Austin, with both Jean Todt and Nick Craw, head of ACCUS, and I know no one knows what that is but look it up, reported as saying they knew nothing and still do not. Todt is saying it is a "project," i.e. not yet real. This all comes from an article in the Austin Business Journal, seems they are still sceptical of the whole deal. Tavo Hellmund is reported off in South Africa, at the World Cup or raising money? Tilke say they will have a track layout in September, but no one knows where the site is yet.

Jonathon Summerton seems to have become the spokesperson for Cypher, the latest would be US F1 team. Jonathon tells us there is a lot going on and he is learning a lot from these ex F1 guys. Hard to see how they are keeping this so secret, surely someone out there knows who these guys are? Tony Dowe, you always know everthing.

Sir Frank Williams is handing over the CEO role at Williams to Adam Parr, but will remain the Team Principal and front up at the shop every day. Amazing man, it would be great to see Williams bounce back. Not that they are doing bad at the moment, but we remember the glory days and their innovations.

Over at the Rally of Bulgaria there are two headlines almost side by side, have to laugh, "Raikkonen for a podium," "Raikkonen crashes and stops special stage." Just about sums up Kimi's year. I hope you are enjoying it Kimi.

Holiday Monday and not much happening, despite a weekend of racing. Had a great evening at my partner's last night for July 4th. Really nice temperatures and no humidity, lovely.

Happy Birthday Tony Dowe, may you have many more. New blog by "Murphy The Bear" always funny, and some suspect Tony of at least feeding the rumor mill.

The good news for Mark Webber is that he is getting a new chassis after his accident at Valencia, the bad news it is Vettels old chassis. OK, they say they have fixed it, but what message does that send to a driver?

Is F1 well on the way to being a spec series? We have strict rules on engine specs and they are trying to equalise horespower, common ECU, spec tire, and now they are saying they should mandate the weight distribution. Why? To stop teams getting it wrong when they design next years car without knowing exactly what Pirelli is going to provide. Isn't that what this is all about? We will soon have a spec chassis, but wait, wasn't that what Max Mosely wanted? Let's just go with GP2 cars and save probably $200m a team. But who would want to watch?

Talking of spec series and who would want to watch, someone wants to resurrect the A1GP series that lost about $200m the first year and struggled on for a couple more. Why would you want to revive this? They propose to run it like GP2 this time around. Don't we have a series called that? Who else thinks we have too many series already?