Bet on Button

Early purchasers of grandstand seats for next year's British GP will get £50 refunds if British driver Jenson Button wins the race.

It's an offer to fans who buy three-day seats for the July 8 race at Silverstone by the end of this month.

Without the V8 Supercars at Albert Park next March, the Australian GP organisers may well need to offer special enticements to Aussie fans. How about a refund if Mark Webber wins in Melbourne?

The problem is the Oz organisers are playing with taxpayer money, but the Victorian government is already underwriting big losses on the race and any more may be overlooked in the excitement of a Webber win.

The Australian public remains cynical about Webber's performances in Formula One, which have much more to do with the unreliability of his Williams car than his driving.

Webber's 2007 team, Red Bull, is not yet a top contender but, with the weight of tycoon Dietrich Mateschitz's money behind it, is not to be under-estimated. A Webber victory at Albert Park next March is still a mighty long shot though.

At an Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide in the early 1990s Michael Schumacher said he didn't want to grow old in F1. The seven-time world champion is now within four months of his 38th birthday and little more than four days from the announcement the F1 world is waiting on: whether the German is quitting or going on in 2007. It will be central to Ferrari's announcement after Sunday's Italian GP of its driver line-up for next season.

Schumacher holds virtually every record in F1 worth having. What more could he want? The only possible goal would be 100 GP wins. He has 89 already (38 more than previous record-holder Alain Prost), and to reach the 'ton' would take probably another two seasons. Australian fans should know his decision just before midnight Sunday, eastern time.

As the F1 season nears its climax, Renault and McLaren have queried the legality of Ferrari's wheel fairings. Ferrari says the black wheel-rim covers on the rear of its cars aid brake cooling, not aerodynamic efficiency.

Renault's mass damper system was recently ruled illegal on the grounds it broke the rules on moving aerodynamic pieces. Ferrari introduced its fairings at the Turkish GP -- won for it by Felipe Massa with Schumacher third, behind Renault's Alonso -- and has since tested with them and is intending to run them at Monza this weekend.

Renault technical chief Pat Symonds has questioned whether Ferrari is violating rules forbidding changes to brakes under parc ferme conditions. "You're allowed to change the wheels, but Ferrari are also changing their car's brake cooling," Symonds says.

The man responsible for creating Mark Webber's next F1 car knocked himself out in a crash at the Goodwood Revival Meeting in Britain last weekend. Adrian Newey spun his E-type Jaguar into a barrier and had to spend a night in hospital, after which he said he felt as though he still had severe jet lag.

Newey also recently crashed a Ford GT40. Considered a genius for the winning cars he designed for Williams and McLaren, Newey is now with the Red Bull team where Webber will join David Coulthard next season.

Two cleaners at the McLaren F1 factory in Britain sold stolen memorabilia for up to US$20,000 on eBay. The items included clothes, flags and model F1 cars. McLaren has sacked a worker who supplied the cleaners.