MOTORSPORT: F1 murkier than fuel row

Red Bull Racing is confident it has a strong case to have the podium place returned to its 24-year-old Australian, along with the 18 points it would carry for him in Formula One’s drivers’ world championship and the team in the constructors’ world championship. However, FIA president Jean Todt and F1 race director Charlie Whiting have been adamant that the Gill fuel sensor at the centre of the controversy is the only accepted measure of fuel flow, which is limited to 100kg/hour.

The FIA disqualified Ricciardo five hours after he became the first Australian to finish on the podium in his home race since the Oz GP became an F1 event in 1985, saying his car not only had exceeded that limit but that RBR had failed to comply after warnings during qualifying and the first five laps of the race.

The Paris hearing is the first critical test of the rules in the era of the new, quieter V6 turbo-hybrid cars in F1.

A decision on the appeal should come before this weekend’s Chinese GP in Shanghai – perhaps even as early as Australian breakfast time Tuesday.

In any case, there are murkier matters in F1 – off the tracks – that we’ll come to below.

Power second at Long Beach, Brabham on Lights podium
Will Power came from 14th on the grid in today’s IndyCar race at Long Beach, California, to finish second and retain his lead in the series. Matthew Brabham, 20-year-old grandson of Sir Jack, was third in the IndyLights race there in only his second start in that category.

Meantime, Ryan Briscoe dropped out of the main IndyCar race at Long Beach with problems in his Ganassi car’s Chevrolet engine, while Marcos Ambrose started fourth and finished 14th on Saturday in the eighth round of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup at Darlington, South Carolina.

And Frenchman Sebastien Loeb, retired from rallying after a record nine world titles, has won a World Touring Car Championship race at Marrakech in Morocco from ninth on a grid of 14 cars. Loeb was driving at Citroen, of course, and trails his Argentinean teammate Jose Maria Lopez, winner of the first race there and then second to Loeb, by one point in the championship.

The action-packed IndyCar race was won by British driver, Mike Conway – who will only do rounds of the series not on ovals, at which owner-driver Ed Carpenter will fill the cockpit.

The top four finishers this morning, Australian time, made up 48 positions in the race. Conway started 17th and Juan Pablo Montoya, back in IndyCar racing as a teammate of Power in Roger Penske’s three-car outfit, picked up 12 places to be fourth, behind his Colombian countryman, Carlos Munoz.

New Zealander Scott Dixon was headed for victory until he ran low on fuel, had to make a late stop and wound up 12th.

The pole-position starter and 2012 series champion, American Ryan Hunter-Reay, dominated much of the race until a mistake trying to overtake a car on cold tyres and caused a pile-up.

Power, who was within a second of Conway at the chequered flag after winning the opening round a fortnight earlier in Florida, has 93 points to the Englishman’s 66, with the next round at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama on April 27.

While 14th at Darlington wasn’t anywhere near as good as his two top-five finishes in the Sprint Cup this season, Marcos Ambrose claimed “a lot of positives” from the race before the first break in the NASCAR season over Easter.

“All in all, not a bad weekend,” Ambrose said of his performance his Richard Petty Motorsports Ford.

The Tasmania was  two laps down at one point and 20th late in the race.

Chevrolet veteran Jeff Gordon, seventh at Darlington, leads the series ahead of Matt Kenseth (Toyota), Carl Edwards (Ford), Dale Earnhardt Junior (Chevrolet), Jimmie Johnson (Chevrolet) and Kyle Busch (Toyota), while Ambrose is 17th.

Kevin Harvick won at Darlington in a Chevrolet, leading 238 of 374 laps and becoming the first two-time winner this season - but still only 22nd in the points.

Harvick’s victory was his 25th in the Sprint Cup and he now has won NASCAR’s four biggest races – the Daytona 500, Brickyard 400, World 600 and Southern 500. He is in his first season with Stewart-Haas Racing, the team owned by three-time Cup champion Tony Stewart and tycoon Gene Haas and which also fields cars for Stewart, Kurt Busch and Danica Patrick.

Which brings us to another matter …

America’s new F1 team owner has form
Haas meanwhile has been given the green light by the FIA to start an F1 team. It will be the first from America for 30 years – since the ill-fated effort by Carl Haas (no relation) for which Australia’s 1980 world champion Alan Jones drove his last GPs, and four years after the USF1 project of Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson failed to get a car built.

It’s not clear yet whether the new Haas Formula will be ready to compete next year or not until 2016.

Apart from co-owning Stewart-Haas Racing in NASCAR, the 61-year-old Haas has a $40 million full-scale rolling wind tunnel in North Carolina, the centre of American stock car racing, owns Haas Automation, one of the world’s largest machine tool makers (with Caterpillar among its main customers), and has a European base in Brussels.

What weekend reports of his admission to F1 didn’t tell you is that Haas was arrested eight years ago on US tax evasion charges, sentenced to two years in jail, served about 18 months and paid more than US$75 million in fines and back taxes.

A former employee told at the time of “ultra-creative invoicing”.

Haas also completed the US Federal Bureau of Prisons’ 500-hour drug and alcohol rehabilitation program his lawyers had requested when he was sentenced to jail.

News of the Haas entry to F1, expected to be with a Dallara chassis and Ferrari power unit, came barely a week before F1’s long-time commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone is to go on trial in Munich charged with paying a US$44 million bribe to a former German banker, Gerhard Gribkowsky.

The German is already a couple of years into a long sentence for receiving that money.

Ecclestone does not deny paying Gribkowsky but claims he was being blackmailed.

In a recent civil damages case in London’s High Court, which Ecclestone won (or rather didn’t lose), Mr Justice Guy Newey commented that the payments were a bribe, saying Ecclestone wanted to ensure a block of almost half the shares in the F1 business were steered into the hands of private equity company CVC almost a decade ago because he felt it was the buyer most likely to retain him.

Although Ecclestone resigned from F1’s parent company Delta Topco when he was charged in Germany, which has precluded him signing major contracts for the sport, he intends to remain at the day-to-day helm other than the Tuesdays and Wednesdays that he will be required in the Munich court.

Meanwhile, the owners of the Force India F1 team, which is second to Mercedes in the world championship and uses the same engines, have their share of headaches.

Force India’s front man, VJ Mallya, has seen his Kingfisher Airlines collapse and owes huge amounts of money, although the team’s finances are thought to be secure for this season. However, another Indian tycoon, Subrata Roy Sahara, who assumed almost 43 per cent of the team after loans were not repaid, has been in Tihar Prison in Delhi for six weeks for failing meet a High Court order to repay investors US$1.6 billion.

While F1 newcomer Haas has done the time for his crime, he need not feel out of place in the sport’s gallery of rogues.

And the FIA has said it is considering another application for a new F1 team – from an outfit titled Forza Rossa, headed by a previous colourful F1 identity, Romanian ex-dentist, Colin Kolles.

The driving force behind Forza Rossa though is reputed to be Ion Bazac, a doctor and former Romanian health minister whose business interests include that country’s Ferrari importer.

The last time new teams were admitted to F1 was 2010. One of those three, Hispania Racing Team, collapsed at the end of 2011, having given Daniel Ricciardo his debut. The other two survivors, Marussia and Caterham, have yet to score a world championship point by finishing in the top 10 of a GP.