MOTORSPORT: Aussie teens star in highland fling

Two 16-year-old Australians have dominated the latest round of the British Formula 4 Championship.

Luis Leeds (pictured), from Melbourne, and Zane Goddard, from Surfers Paradise, finished first and second in two of the weekend's three F4 races at the Knockhill circuit in Scotland, part of the support program to the British Touring Car Championship.

Leeds, already in the Red Bull junior development program that has produced Formula 1 stars Daniel Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel, has jumped from sixth to second in the British F4 series.

Goddard, the round winner at Knockhill with 58 points (to runner-up Leeds' 53), is seventh in the points, with three rounds – comprising nine races – at the Rockingham, Silverstone and Brands Hatch circuits remaining.

The previous series leader, Romanian Petru Florescu, was excluded from the Knockhill round after having won the opening race but then having an altercation with one of his Carlin Motorsport teammates, Canadian Devlin Defrancesco, after a collision in the second race.

Leeds won that race by less than half a second from Goddard, while in the final, feature race of the round Goddard took the chequered flag 5.8 seconds ahead of his fellow Aussie.

It was Goddard's second victory of the British F4 season (the first was at the Croft circuit) while Leeds has now won three of the 21 races so far (his earlier victories were at Thruxton and Croft). Florescu has dropped to sixth in the championship but still has five wins, even after the Knockhill disqualification, while British driver Sennan Fielding has had four. Another British youngster with just one win, Max Fewtrell, now leads the series with 232 points to Leeds' 227. Goddard has 178. He wound up third in the amended results for the first Knockhill race and Leeds fifth.

Both the Australian teenagers came out of the inauguaral season of F4 in Australia last year. While they weren't among the top guns on home soil (Leeds finished sixth in the points and Goddard ninth), Leeds won the F4 race at the revived Mexican F1 grand prix late last year and had a win at Sydney Motorsport Park several weeks ago during a break in the British series.

Leeds races in Britain for the Arden team founded by Red Bull Racing F1 team principal Christian Horner and lives near Silverstone, the home of the British GP.

Goddard lives at Woking, the town that is home to the McLaren F1 team, and drives for Double R Racing, which is jointly owned by 2007 F1 world champion and Ferrari GP driver Kimi Raikkonen and his manager, Steve Robertson.

The cars the pair race are French-built Mygales with 1.6-litre Ford Ecoboost engines – like those in Australian F4.

Goddard was described as having been "in a league of his own" and "simply untouchable" on the way to his emphatic victory in the final race on the short (just 2.032km) Knockhill circuit, which he said "played out perfectly".

"I was super-consistent. It felt perfect. It couldn't have been any better," Goddard said.

"The car was so good it was hard to actually do anything wrong in it.

"Knockhill is a circuit where there isn't too much breaking, which means you're pushing the car quite hard most of the time and to the limit, which is trick to do – but it's rewarding when it works out."

Goddard had made lightning starts all weekend.

Leeds said his weekend "started off pretty average" but improved from the second race, for which he had pole position after the top placegetters from the first race were reversed on the grid.

He also said his car had felt "pretty perfect" and he was "starting to get things together now".

Leeds was lauded for the overtake of the Knockhill meeting on British lad Alex Quinn in the final race.

"I learnt that move from Daniel Ricciardo when he did something very similar to Vettel at Monza when they were teammates [at Red Bull Racing in 2014] and I really hope he [Ricciardo] gets to watch my move," Leeds said.

"I saw Alex make a mistake and I was originally going to go around the outside, but I thought I would make it look cool and switch to going down the inside.

"It looks pretty cool on camera, I think.

"We're pretty close to leading the championship now and we must keep this form going now.

"This morning I was 48 points off the lead and now I'm only five away, which is the beauty of this sport."

The British F4 Championship ends on the first weekend of October. Last year's series was won by Britain's Lando Norris, who was 15 then and has since won New Zealand's Toyota Racing Series and excelled in Formula Renault in Europe.
Red Bull and Renault all loved up again
What a difference a year makes.

It doesn't seem that long ago that Red Bull's Helmut Marko and Christian Horner were decrying their F1 power unit supplier Renault and wanting a "divorce".

But when they found Mercedes, Ferrari and Honda either unwilling or unable to supply them, they had no option but to stick with Renault, although the units in Daniel Ricciardo and Max Verstappen's RB12 cars now carry TAG Heuer badging.

Horner has been profuse in his praise for Renault recently, saying the French manufacturer has been primarily responsible for Red Bull Racing halving Mercedes' advantage this season – although there won't be another major upgrade of its 1.6-litre V6 hybrid now until next season.

"The most significant area [of improvement in the RB12] is on the engine, and credit where credit's due," Horner has told Britain's Autosport.

"The guys [at Renault], with the restructuring they put into place at the back end of last year, the philosophy changes made, the developments brought in, the engine has clearly made a step forward.

"We've probably halved the gap to Mercedes, and there seems to be a real direction, and good leadership technically at Viry [Renault's F1 engine base in France].

"We've made progress on the chassis, and of course these things have to work in combination, but the biggest element I would say is the step forward in the engine.

"The engine was delivered absolutely on target to what was projected pre-season.

"So if they can do the same again, then hopefully we should really reduce that gap significantly to at least this year's Mercedes, and who knows what they have in the pipeline for next year – but it should be another good step.

"We could never have imagined in a million years what we have achieved in the first half of the year [second in the constructors' championship, leading Ferrari] – it's been very positive.

"It's great motivation for everybody to have got back on the right trajectory.

"You can feel in the factory there's a real buzz around this.

"Our feeling is we should get stronger in the second half of the year and hopefully we can put up a good fight with Ferrari as we head to the end of the championship.

"If we can build on what we've achieved in the first half, and if we could beat Ferrari to second place in the constructors', that would be an unbelievable result."

Horner said that genius designer Adrian Newey, who had scaled back his involvement in F1 because of his disdain for regulations that curtailed his innovation with aerodynamics, was now much more involved again.

He has devoted a lot of his time the past couple of years to an America's Cup yachting project and the Aston Martin hypercar.

However, Newey's enthusiasm for F1 has been fired by next year's rules that will allow more scope for chassis development as well as wider tyres.

"Adrian withdrew himself somewhat with the RB12. I would say that his share [of the RB12] is only 20 per cent, which shows how well our engineering office is doing," Horner told Germany's Auto Motor und Sport publication.

"[But] the new rules have Adrian fully motivated again. With next year's car I would say he is back up at 50 per cent."
American GT-Rs on the way to Oz
While Australia's James Davison was sidelined from the weekend's Pirelli World Challenge GT sprint round in the US, his Californian teammate Bryan Heitkotter won both races at the Utah Motorsports Campus in another Nissan GT-R NISMO GT3.

Davison had been suspended by the series organisers for one race for a second track "conviction" this season but the Always Evolving team opted to keep British substitute Craig Dolby in Davison's car for both Utah races.

It was a breakout weekend for Heitkotter, the inaugural Nissan GT Academy USA winner five years ago.

His success was Always Evolving's first since Davison won a race at Road America last year.

And it was reported over the weekend – by John Dagys of Sportscar365.com – that Always Evolving's two 2014-spec GT'Rs "will be headed to a customer in Australia, who plans to enter the cars in the Australian GT Championship – and potentially the Bathurst 12-Hour".

Dagys said he had been told by Davison that "there's a chance he may be part of the team's run at Mt Panorama in February".
Cloud over China's new world rally
The World Rally Championship is back on tarmac later this week in Germany, with the new round in China due to follow on September 8-11.

However, veteran rally correspondent Martin Holmes has noted for Australia's RallySportMag.com that "alarming reports from Chinese media suggested damage by the [recent] storms [in the area of the area of the Rally China course] had created a local financial crisis which threatened the event".

Holmes said news since had been slow on the severity of the storm damage to the roads.