It has been a year since I got bored during the holidays and started this Formula 1 blog. So Happy 1st Birthday to F1Wolf ! OK, it did not start as F1Wolf right away… This is how the blog looked for first few months:

Then in July 2007 F1Wolf.com domain came along and with it a design change:

I was not too happy with it though, and so in September 2007 I launched the current theme with Stefan Johansson’s turbo Ferrari

Thank you all who come to read these pages regularly, leave comments or link to this site ! It is definitely fun writing when you know people are reading . I hope you stay (or for newcomers become) loyal F1Wolf readers, join the current pack and have fun with the Prediction Game that you can join right now here or if you do not have enough of it you can also join F1Wolf on Facebook .

And I will go now to pop some Mumm

F1Wolf

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Drop out no 1 - The looser

Jacques Villeneuve - Has been dropped by the Bill Davis Racing NASCAR team after hitting a wall and causing a multi-car accident during a qualifying for the Daytona 500. (reported by grandprix.com)

Drop out no 2 - The winner

Ralf Schumacher - After 11 years in the Formula 1 World Championship, Ralf Schumacher (32) will race this year with the Trilux AMG Mercedes C-Class in the DTM, Mercedes-Benz Motorsport announced today. Ralf Schumacher’s DTM debut will take place at the season opener in Hockenheim on 13th April 2008. (Daimler Media)

F1Wolf

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Few days back I spotted the predictions for the 2008 Formula 1 season made by the Swiss paper Blick based on the winter testing form of the teams. Here is how they predict the form of all 11 F1 teams for the coming season:

Blick has Ferrari and McLaren at the top followed by … Williams. Then follow Renault and BMW Sauber. Red Bull and Toro Rosso next, ahead of Toyota and Honda. Force India is closing the Blick’s top ten. The in-the-trouble Super Aguri is expected to be at the tail of the order.

Now let’s see how it compares with my 2008 F1 team form prediction

• F1 Wolf / Blick

1. Ferrari / Ferrari
2. Mclaren / McLaren
3. Renault / Williams
4. BMW Sauber / Renault
5. Williams / BMW Sauber
6. Red Bull / Red Bull
7. Toyota / Toro Rosso
8. Honda / Toyota
9. Toro Rosso / Honda
10. Force India / Force India
11. Super Aguri / Super Aguri

Blick’s prediction is not bad, but I am for the moment sticking with mine

F1Wolf

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I believe that by now Max Mosley is not the only person with serious doubts about the future of the smallest team on the Formula 1 grid. These are the latest words of Aguri Suzuki, the team owner:

“Super Aguri will not take part in testing in Barcelona this week because of elements out of our control. We plan however to particpate in tests from next week on the Catalunya circuit with two cars.”

It has been only a week ago that Super Aguri postponed their car launch planned for today. However team boss Aguri Suzuki and technical director Mark Preston were to be at the circuit to answer media questions. This is apparently not going to happen today…

There was a bit of good news last week for the team when they finally made it to the test track, although with one car only. Both Takuma Sato and Anthony Davidson felt confident they would secure their race seat cotract with the team. Moreover Sato sounded quite sure the team will weather their current financial troubles. That feel good mood did not last for long …

There has been a lot of Superi Aguri rumours in the news - the rumours of team sale to Alejandro Agag, the plans from Indian consortium Spice Group to invest (or purchase the team) and place Narain Karthikeyan into the cockpit. Most recently Russian investment was mentioned in connection with Super Aguri. Nothing however have worked out yet and does not look like it is going to anytime soon …

The time is running out for Super Aguri and if no new money comes buy soon, the team’s future will solely depend on the mercy from Honda, Nick Fry late in January:

The intent for 2008 is that Aguri will be on the grid but clearly what Ross (Brawn) and I need to do, and are doing, is ensure that doesn’t detract from our primary job. At this stage, the intent is that they will be on the grid with Honda engines and support. Exactly how much of that support comes from here is being worked on at the moment.

The last thing the troubled Honda team now needs is a distraction and diversion of resources towards Super Aguri. I am afraid that unless there is some development benefit (more test mileage) from having baby B team on the grid, Honda may want to pull the plug on Super Aguri sooner than later. They do not need 2 teams at the back of the grid …

Let’s see how this develops further. The plans (to show up at the next test and run 2 cars) are just the plans, as was the car launch, as was the appearance of Suzuki and Preston for the media. Once the “elements out of our control” enter the picture, the future is rarely bright and rarely orange. Arrows could talk …

F1Wolf

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All the teams except Toyota and Ferrari, but finally including Super Aguri, tested in Jerez last week. Williams and Red Bull tested for 4 days, the rest for 3 days only.

As usual it is hard to read into the times. But there are few things that are becoming obvious:

McLarens did look like the fastest cars out of the Jerez pack, although on Wednesday Mark Webber, Nico Rosberg, Kazuki Nakajima, Fernando Alonso and Robert Kubica all managed better times than quickest of McLaren’s - Lewis Hamilton. A day later however it was Heikki Kovalainen on top, and around 1.5 second faster than Lewis Hamilton. This big difference suggests that each driver was on different program… They also tried out some weird looking wheel covers.

How close to or ahead of Ferrari they are is everybody’s guess…

Red Bull and Williams did very well. The ugly fin on Red Bull seems to be working and looks set to stay … Nakajima is quite impressive in Williams and I would lie if I say I expected him to be pretty much on par with Nico Rosberg. The races may be different story, but so far so good for Williams and for Nakajima. BMW and Renault are 2 other teams that form the very strong upper midfield group. These four may be a bit behind McLaren at the moment, but it looks like the days of top 6 pre-booked for Ferrari, McLaren and BMW drivers are over. The Q2s are going to be very intense with 12 cars at least fighting it out for 10 places in Q3 …

Then there is Toro Rosso somehow standing alone between the top and the bottom. Vettel seems to be a tenth or two faster than Bourdais. They are still running the old car, the new one not expected before the beginning of the European F1 season. But judging from their current form, starting the season with an old car is not going to hurt them.

Force India car, despite getting a facelift, remains firmly among the backmarkers. There however seems to be quite a difference between performances of Giancarlo Fisichella and Adrian Sutil (and Tonio Liuzzi). Looks like Fisi is out to prove his critics wrong …

Honda still lacks the speed and the three second gap between Button and Kovalainen on Thursday looks scary. But the guys at Honda seem to be happy and quite upbeat after the Jerez test. Clearly clocking quick times was not why they went to Jerez. The updates expected for the final test in Barcelona are supposed to address all the issues with the car the team has identified, so let’s wait and see …

Super Aguri made it clear to the world they still exist. Both Sato and Davidson (although still without contract for 2008) took the car around the Jerez track. They were slower than Honda proper, but the gaps were just around a tenth of a second. Unfortunately these days being a tenth slower than Honda is not a exactly good news.

F1Wolf

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Besides the Formula 1 ticketing fiasco, there was another big thing happening in Singapore last week - the annual Street and Floats Parade - Chingay.

The parade followed several parts of the Singapore Formula 1 street track. However the main connection between the Chingay and Formula 1 was the Red Bull car show. The Red Bull F1 car was driven by Robert Wickens. As the parade was an evening event, people could get a glimpse of Formula 1 car on lit up street (not the proper F1 lighting yet though ). Did not look too bad judging from this photo.

You can read what preceded the actual show. This is a post written by a lucky blogger that actually got to sit in the Formula 1 car …

F1Wolf

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The latest round of Wolf’s selection from the webs and blogs is here.

The season start is getting closer and all sorts of predictions for the season are appearing on F1 blogs. Williams are pleasant surprise and here is a sum of some reasons why they are perhaps the best of the rest.

News that McLaren will take a their place in the pit lane between Williams and BMW and not at end (after finishing last on the constructors table last year) circulated the web. There has been nothing official yet, but the rumours were that the deal was brokered by Bernie Ecclestone. But did he actually had to broker a deal ? How are the garages in the pit lane actually alocated to the teams ? F1 To Go asks this question and tries to find some answers.

The 24 Le Mans will feature several F1 names this year with Peugeot fielding several big names.

Roy Scheider, probably best known for his role in Jaws, passed away last week. The AutomoBlog found a great car chase video from a movie featuring Roy Scheider.

Ferrari seem to be early favourites going into 2008 season. They are however doing well off the track too the F1 financial report reveals.

Force India will pursue the arbitration against Toro Rosso and Super Aguri, the customer cars issue is still on the table …

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The IT systems not being able to handle a demand from buyers is the last thing one would expect to happen in Singapore out of all the places on this planet. Well, after yesterday nothing will ever surprise me any more …

After some delays the tickets for the Singapore GP, the first Formula 1 night race finally went for sale yesterday morning. They are not that many when compared to other tracks - only 70,000 pcs. And there are not that many available with really good views. At the end, it is a city street track and the space for grandstands is limited. So everybody planning to buy expected a rush for the good (and extremely expensive even in F1 standards to be honest) tickets the moment the sales channels go live.

Well everybody except the ticketing company, one called Omniticket …

I am lucky to be living in the same timezone as Singapore, although some 3000 km away. So 9am I was ready to go online, make a quick purchase and get on with my day. It was not to be …

The Singapore GP official site worked perfect until you clicked on the Buy Ticket link. Then all sorts of error messages begun showing up (click on picture to enlarge):

The most common sight was however this:

If you managed to get as far as actually selecting the tickets, a feast that took good 10 minutes if you got that far, a check out page came up counting down the time you have to finalize the transaction. You are too slow and the tickets reserved will be released back. It should have been 10 minutes, but before the countdown even appeard the time was down to about 7 minutes. At the speed the site worked yesterday, 7 minutes was an impossible timeframe. Absolutelly hopeless …

Read the rest of this entry »

F1Wolf

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It is getting close. We are now only 30 days from the Australian GP.

Athough we did not have chance to see Ferrari side be side with McLaren during the tests for quite some time, it looks at the moment that Ferrari is the team beat. They were comprehensively faster than Toyota in Bahrain and the gap in the early days was scary …

Force India revealed their car in Mumbai in a grand ceremony. Their livery sure does look different. We haven’t had so much gold colour on a F1 car for a long time.

Bernie Ecclestone fired some shots in the direction of Australia and the future of the race in Melbourne does not look too good. There were track related news coming from all over the place, good news for places, bad news for others, Silverstone being the other one in Bernie’s firing range.

Super Aguri is the last team to launch a new car, the team however cancelled the planned February 19 launch. All the other Formula 1 teams have already revealed their 2008 liveries, except for Williams, unless the leaked one is the one.

The tickets for Singapore Grand Prix went on sale today, but better do not get me started on this one. I will make a post on that once I calm down … All I can say now is I hope that they do better job with the lighting of the track than they did with mess they dare to call ticketing …

Back to track action. The tests in Spain suggest that a strong group is forming behind Ferrari and McLaren. BMW Sauber seem to have overcome their initial balance issues, Williams front wing problems look to be solved, Renault is right there with these 2 and Red Bull and their ugly finned car is doing quite OK.

Toyota struggled a bit early on in Bahrain but they did pick up some pace. Honda still struggles and is not picking up any pace …

McLaren took up on the challenge from Red Bull and submitted their own entry into the “Ugly and Uglier” contest with their newest wheel cover design (on show in Jerez right now).

And rumours surfaced that McLaren may not have to spend the 2008 in the last pit garage …

If you are on Facebook, join the F1Wolf group and help me to figure out what to do with it .

The season countdown will be back in 10 days.

F1Wolf

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I haven’t seen any official news yet. There are however 2 blogs at least reporting the story that Bernie brokered a deal to move McLaren away from the wrong end of the pitlane towards the front.

You can see more at F1-To Go and F1Fanatic.

Interesting. I like the picture F1-To Go has with the article

F1Wolf

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